THE 



AND 







DWIN DAVIES 
CHOONMAKER 




Class ^ 

Book 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSrr. 



THE 
WORLD STORM 

AND BEYOND 



THE 

WORLD STORM 

AND BEYOND 



BY 
EDWIN DAVIES SCHOONMAKER 

AUTHOR OF "the SAXONS," "tHK AMERICANS," ETC. 



««««Ws»i9^ 




NEW YORK 

THE CENTURY CO. 

1915 






Copyright, 1914, 1915, by 
The Century Co. 



Published May, 1915 



JUN 2 1915 
©GI,A401192 



TO 

N. M. S. 

COMRADE IN 
PEACE AND WAR 



FOEEWORD 

I have tried in the following pages to set forth in 
their historical perspective some of the causes of the 
great war and also to trace some of its probable con- 
sequences. Never in all history was it so difficult to 
put the significance of a war between the covers of a 
single book, for aside from the difficulty of distinguish- 
ing in the prevailing confusion what is important from 
what is incidental, never before were so many and such 
longstanding dynastic, national, and racial ambitions 
the tools of such complex social forces. Looking out 
over Europe to-day one sees as from all sides of a vast 
arena an outrushing of all the wild beasts which for a 
century society has kept partially pacified. All the 
problems which we have inherited from the past and 
have elbowed toward the future, making the present 
comfortable with compromise, have come out under 
cover of the storm and are seeking in war those solu- 
tions which in peace were seemingly impossible of at- 
tainment. It is the flaring up of these long-smoldering 
aspirations of humanity for larger freedom and better 
conditions of life that is giving to the present conflict a 
meaning immeasurably greater and an issue of far 
vaster consequence than at first could possibly be di- 
vined. Indeed, within the past few months, the char- 



FOEEWOED 

acter of the war has undergone a surprising' change. 
Starting with an assassination, an attack upon a dy- 
nasty, then rushing to a conflict between nations and 
between races, recently, as though a veil were being 
slowly lifted, we have become aware that all these are 
but streams flowing into a sea of a mighty social war. 
It is not at all improbable that this may be its final 
name, the Great Social War. For in the absence of 
the armies upon the borders and under the urgency of 
keeping them there, reforms nothing short of amazing 
are swiftly and surely transforming Europe into some- 
thing which the sociologist will have difficulty in recog- 
nizing as the Europe of yesterday. "While kings are 
speaking, humanity is also having its say. A moiety 
of consolation for a sacrifice so immense. And yet, 
who knows ? Peace has had its curses quite as blight- 
ing as war. 

Particularly is it important that America should 
keep her eyes upon the social changes that are taking 
place in Europe. For while we are congratulating 
ourselves upon our good fortune in that peace is still 
with us, we are in imminent danger of losing sight of 
the fact that the present war has lessons for us beyond 
field operations and armament construction. For if 
when the conflict is ended we are wiser only in defend- 
ing our shores from a foreign foe, we shall find beyond 
doubt that Europe has marched through blood and 
death into a new and better age and that America has 
been left hopelessly behind. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS 

OHAPTBB PAGH 

I FROM O^SAB TO KAISER 3 

II RUSSIA AND THE OPEN SEA 29 

III THE DEMOCRATIC RUSSIANS 55 

IV LAND AND WAR 83 

V EMPIRE OR FEDERATION 113 

VI THE FALL OR RISE OP SOCIALISM 137 

VII HAS THE CHURCH COLLAPSED? 165 

VIII THE COSMIC MEANING OF WOMAN 193 

IX POETOGAMY 221 

X THE CULTURAL OBSESSION 249 

XI THE MORAL FAILURE OF " EFFICIENCY "... 273 



FEOM C^SAE TO KAISER 



THE WORLD STORM 
AND BEYOND 



FROM C^SAR, TO KAISER 

NOTHING is more striking to the student 
of history, especially to one interested in 
the growth of institutions, than to watch through 
the centuries the specter of Caesar moving north- 
ward over Europe. The shadow of a dark 
cloud passing over a field on a clear day in 
summer is not more visible to the physical eye 
than is this other shadow that gathered head 
over Rome two thousand years ago, spread out 
for a time east and west and south, but finally 
all but withdrew itself from these quarters, and 
made northward like a thing that had at last 
found its way. It is not by mere chance that 
the German Emperor wears to-day the title of 
Kaiser, a modification of CsBsar, or that his 
royal cousin to the north wears the title of 
Czar, another modification of the same name. 

3 



THE WOELD STORM AND BEYOND 

Nor is it strange that this old title should have 
entirely disappeared from the South, where it 
originated. 

Taking the world as a whole, the movement 
of civilization, with all its paraphernalia, good 
and evil, is westward; but taking Europe by 
itself, the movement is northward. Italy, 
France, Germany, Russia — these are the suc- 
cessive steps of civilization on the continent of 
Europe. And over these in this order the 
shadow and the sunlight have passed and are 
passing. England, separated from the Conti- 
nent geographically, is also something of a law 
to itself in the matter of its development, and 
for this reason chiefly it has escaped the full 
blight of Csesarism, and has thus been enabled 
in times of crisis to come forth as the deliverer 
of her sister-nations. England is like a rocky 
shore where the strength of the wave is broken 
and scattered, whereas on the Continent the 
surge has had, as it were, an open sea over 
which it could travel freely to the farthest lands 
that men have conquered in the North. And 
looking out over the expanse of history, we can 
follow this surge of Csesarism, with its dark 
shadow of militarism, from its ominous rise in 
Italy twenty centuries ago ; over France, where 

4 



FROM C^SAR TO KAISER 

it was shattered; over Germany, where it tow- 
ers to-day; and on up into Russia, where in 
outward appearance it is piling high for the fu- 
ture. 

Let us see what this Caesarism is that is just 
now setting Europe in tumult, and under the 
leadership of the German Kaiser is hurling its 
might in every direction, as in those old days 
when Rome flung her legions to every point of 
the compass. 

The first Caesar, whose name in a modified 
form is to-day in the mouths of more than one- 
half of the population of Europe, was the first 
great Roman to turn the face of his martial 
nation toward the north. Julius Caesar was not 
a man to plow over old fields. Asia and Africa 
had no attraction for him ; and so when it came 
to choosing a province for his activities, he 
turned toward the Alps, and led his legions 
across into Gaul, which is now France. If Ju- 
lius Caesar had been simply a man, his name 
would long ago have been forgotten. But he 
was more than a man. He was an idea and 
an ideal, the embodiment of imperial Rome 
itself, with all that that means — law and un- 
questioning obedience to law. And with this 
ideal he came among a people that had al- 

5 



THE WOELD STORM AND BEYOND 

ways been a law to themselves, that even in the 
case of murder had never brooked the interfer- 
ence of their own governments in their private 
affairs. And it was upon this people — the 
people that just now on the west bank of the 
Rhine are in arms against the imperial power 
of the Kaiser — that imperial Caesar, two thou- 
sand years ago, began welding the Roman yoke. 
And well he succeeded. Gaul became a Roman 
province. Roman forts sprang up everywhere, 
and Roman legions moved quickly to and fro 
over the marvelous Roman roads. 

Caesarism and militarism — for of course 
among a freedom-loving people the one cannot 
exist without the other — ^had taken their first 
step northward over Europe. Tribes that up 
to this time had been accustomed to govern 
themselves now became accustomed to being 
governed by others, began to tolerate a law en- 
forced by the sword. And finally they them- 
selves, as soldiers of the Roman Empire, began 
to assail the freedom of their brothers farther 
north. But beyond the Rhine they could make 
no headway against the fierce spirit of liberty 
of those kindred tribes, and this river soon be- 
came recognized as the northern boundary of 
the empire. But for several centuries more, 

6 



FROM C^SAR TO KAISER 

over what is now France, the system of the 
Caesars, which to-day we call militarism, held 
sway, slowly consuming the life-blood of the 
people and itself rotting npon the wealth it ab- 
sorbed. Then quietly the scepter of the em- 
pire in the South passed into the hands of the 
popes, and the objective of militarism under- 
went a change. Where of old it had enforced 
the Roman law, it began now to enforce the 
Christian faith, by which it was seen that a new 
hold could be gotten upon peoples that would 
otherwise slip away. 

There is no more interesting chapter of his- 
tory than that which records this subtle trans- 
formation and shows us the native kings of 
these Northern peoples, although politically 
they had thrown off the yoke of Rome, con- 
tinuing to be none the less faithful agents of 
Rome in the establishment of its new hold upon 
the North. Csesarism was still alive, and mili- 
tarism was still its tool. For several centuries 
political and religious absolutism went forth 
from its ancient seat upon the Tiber, until the 
sprit of the people was broken, especially on 
the side of the Rhine where the burden had lain 
long. But in Italy, where it had lain longest, 
a new day began presently to dawn. The old 

7 



THE WOELD STORM AND BEYOND 

German spirit, which had infused itself into the 
race with the coming of the Lombards, broke 
out into flame. In vain the German emperors, 
the representatives of Csesarism in the North, 
came down upon them with their armies. The 
Italian peoples valiantly defended themselves, 
and liberty was again established in the South. 
The shadow had passed off. 

But over France it still lay dark, and with 
the passing of the centuries grew darker and 
darker. "I am the state," proclaimed Louis 
XIV with an arrogance befitting the most ty- 
rannical of the Caesars. And his successors, 
gathering their minions about them in the court 
at Versailles, fiddled while France was burning 
— ^burning underground. For several centuries 
the political agents of the Caesars had nominally 
sat first upon the Swabian and later upon the 
Austrain throne ; but in France, where the peo- 
ple had suffered perhaps more than elsewhere, 
there was a rumbling and a gathering of mighty 
forces that were to eject into the arena of Eu- 
ropean politics a successor of the Caesars worthy 
of the name. As in Italy it was a group of free 
cities that first sprang into new life and kindled 
the new age, in France it was a group of free 
men — ^men with their ears to the ground and 

8 



FROM C^SAR TO KAISER 

with their pens uttering the agony and the 
smoldering desperation of France. It is im- 
possible to understand the real character of the 
encyclopedists and those later fiery leaders of 
the Revolution without some acquaintance with 
those old Gauls like Orgetorix and Vercinge- 
torix who, almost eighteen hundred years be- 
fore, had grappled with the forces of Caesarism 
when they first made head beyond the Alps. 
For these sons of the Revolution were full 
brothers of those older Gauls, and the foe in 
both cases was the same. The French Revolu- 
tion was the long-delayed answer of the con- 
quered Gauls to their conquerors, the Caesars, 
now intrenched not in Rome, but in Paris. 
** Liberty, equality, and fraternity,'* the battle- 
cry of the rising people of France, was a refined, 
philosophic expression of what those dumb 
Gauls had tried to say with their swords to the 
advancing legions of Caesar. 

And now arises one of those strange para- 
doxes of history — a real Caesar emerging out 
of the swirl of the Revolution, and gathering 
its mighty forces into his own person, and in a 
way turning them from their own great ends, 
and yet in a deeper way seized by those forces 
and used to spread their tremendous message 

9 



THE WOELD STORM AND BEYOND 

from one end of Europe to the other. Napoleon 
Bonaparte was beyond question a real Csssar in 
his understanding of the power of militarism 
for the accomplishment of a given end. And 
the end, too, possibly as far as Napoleon him- 
self could see it, and certainly as far as it 
touched his own fortunes, was very CsBsaresque. 
For the armies which he hurled across the Rhine 
and the Danube and finally on into the heart of 
the Muscovite empire, bore on their banners the 
name of Napoleon, as the legions of Caesar had 
borne the name of Caesar, and the power which 
he saw growing up about him was lifting him 
to the throne of a new empire, a French em- 
pire, just as similar forces, directed in a similar 
way, had lifted the first Caesar to the mastery 
of the Roman empire. 

But the paradox is only a seeming one. In 
the larger social use to which he was put, Na- 
poleon Bonaparte was a true Gaul, a creature of 
the rising forces of anti-Caesarism, as the 
crowned heads of Europe knew very well. He 
was a tyrant hitched by the Fates to the plow 
of liberalism, and if his approach produced a 
shuddering in the bosom of the rulers of Aus- 
tria and Prussia, and even in that of the Czar, 
it was chiefly because of this very fact that they 

10 



FROM C^SAR TO KAISER 

isaw behind him the great plowshare of repub- 
licanism that threatened to uproot not simply 
thrones, but, worse still, that reverence of the 
people upon which their thrones were estab- 
lished. And so it was not against the man Na- 
poleon so much as against the idea behind him 
that their cannon were loosened. If there was 
ever any doubt of this during the twenty years 
in which Napoleon went up and down Europe, 
scattering everywhere, with the very songs of 
his soldiers, those firebrands of the French Rev- 
olution, liberty, equality, and fraternity, that 
doubt was dissipated at the Congress of Vienna, 
which met after Napoleon had been permanently 
eliminated from the situation. For to this con- 
gress from the comers of Europe came the refu- 
gee defenders of the old order, to piece together 
as best they might the shattered fragments of 
absolutism. 

It was quite in keeping with her ancient char- 
acter that Austria should assume the leadership 
in this reactionary enterprise, for not Napoleon, 
as we have seen, but the Emperor of Austria 
was the real representative of those imperial 
ideas which Rome had introduced beyond the 
Alps. Unconquerable foe of human progress, 
Austria has alternately attacked and broken up 

11 



THE WORLD STOEM AND BEYOND 

the three great races of Europe, the Latin, the 
German, and the Slav. Never once has she been 
a leader of the forces of freedom. Every one 
knows how, during the Protestant Reformation, 
that uprising of the German people for liberty, 
it was the House of Hapsburg, the ancestors of 
the present Francis Joseph, that went through 
this unfortunate land with fire and sword. And 
for more than half a century after the overthrow 
of Napoleon the history of Europe is virtually 
the history of the mind of Mettemich, the evil 
genius of Austria, in its efforts to smother the 
volcano which France had lighted, and whose 
lava had set all Europe on fire ; whose sparks, 
indeed, had blown clear across the Atlantic, and 
kindled republicanism in South America. 

It is particularly interesting just now, when 
the seed sown in those old days by Austria is 
yielding its terrible harvest, to watch the ef- 
forts of those frightened Caesars, banded in 
Vienna, to gather up and thrust back under- 
ground the embers of freedom in Europe. In- 
deed, one cannot understand the full meaning 
of the tremendous Armageddon that is on to-day 
without some knowledge of how the stage was 
prepared in the first half of the nineteenth cen- 
tury under the malign influence of that same 

12 



FROM C^SAR TO KAISER 

Austria whose hand has just rung up the cur- 
tain for the momentous drama just begun. 

First and most important of those efforts to 
restore what they called the ** peace" of Eu- 
rope, then, was to stop the mouth of the still 
active volcano; and so the Bourbons were re- 
placed upon the throne of France. Second, 
Italy, whose whole northern half had caught 
fire, must be taken under the fatherly care of 
Austria. Third, in those scattered German 
principalities, some of which Napoleon had cap- 
tured from Austria and which he had built into 
a sort of buffer-wall beyond the Rhine, the con- 
stitutions which the people had won from their 
rulers were now taken away from the people, 
and even the student organizations, which with 
a fervor worthy of the French Jacobins were 
working for the freedom of the German people, 
were broken up. 

Quickly now the reactionary movement, which 
up to this time had been dominated by Austria, 
began to come to a head, but not, as the Haps- 
burgs had hoped and expected, in Austria. 
Quietly and almost in a night the spirit of Cae- 
sar crossed the borders of Austria and passed 
on to the north to a small state where the soil 
lay virgin, and where for years the scattered 

13 



THE WORLD STORM AND BEYOND 

forces of Europe had been gathering for the 
building up of a militarism the like of which the 
world had never seen. 

During all the centuries that she had held the 
scepter of the Holy Roman Empire, which, in 
the language of Voltaire, was ''neither holy nor 
Roman nor an empire," Austria had shown a 
conspicuous incapacity to reproduce the empire 
beyond the Alps, and this not at all because 
her ideas were at variance with the ideals 
of the Caesars. The great flaw in her make-up, 
so far as it affected the Romanization of 
the Continent, was her lack of that construc- 
tive vision and that dominating energy which 
were marked in the first Caesar. To bring into 
subjection and to control people — especially 
people with ancient traditions of freedom that 
have always lived in the hearts of Europeans 
even under long-continued tyranny — requires a 
youthful power and a capacity for organization 
such as Austria has never possessed. Therefore 
it is that we see her to-day playing the part she 
has always played, the enemy of freedom, with- 
out the ability to fill the role of the supreme ty- 
rant, trouble-maker still, setting all Europe on 
fire, and yet lacking the eye to see that it is her 
own house she is reducing to ashes. A mind 

14 



FROM C^SAR TO KAISER 

of this sort is no place for the spirit of the first 
Caesar. But Austria, blind then as now, did 
not know that the spirit had taken its depart- 
ure, and so held on to the empty scepter until the 
forces of the North came down upon her, and 
Prussia sprang full armed and vastly ambitious 
into the troubled arena of Europe. 

It is significant to note, in studying the north- 
ward movement of militarism in Europe, that 
at this time when the surge was lifting its great 
head in northern Germany, a wide stir for lib- 
erty was abroad in Italy. That people, which 
centuries before, at the point of the sword, had 
forced its iron law upon the free peoples of 
the North, was now battling with a Northern 
tyrant for its own liberty. The war which 
Prussia fought with Austria was fought with 
a view to gaining power, whereas Italy's strug- 
gle with the same despot was for the purpose 
of achieving freedom. The victory over the 
Hapsburgs won by these two peoples, the one in 
the North and the other in the South, are usually 
compared, with a view to pointing out resem- 
blances. Cavour, it is explained, is Italy's Bis- 
marck; Garibaldi is a lesser Moltke; while Vic- 
tor Emmanuel is the southern William I. Both 
movements, we are told, were movements to- 

15 



THE WORLD STORM AND BEYOND 

ward unification. And this is true ; but no one 
can read even casually the history of those times 
and not perceive at once that the movement in 
Italy was set afoot with a view to escaping from 
a despotic militarism, while the movement in 
Prussia was launched for the purpose of con- 
structing one. 

And to find an adequate counterpart for the 
one which there arose, we cannot stop at the 
regime of Napoleon, which was the result of ab- 
normal conditions and contrary to the aspira- 
tions of the people whom it burdened, but we 
must go back at least to the days when Rome 
was at the height of her military career. In- 
deed, it is extremely doubtful if we shall find it 
even there ; for by militarism we mean not the 
bluster and movement of conquest, but the com- 
plete and permanent organization of a people 
for military purposes. If a nation's energies 
are absorbed in the practice of arms, especially 
if this practice is the result of a deliberate plan 
for a later aggressive movement, that nation is 
in the grasp of militarism even in times of pro- 
tracted peace, though the chances are, if the 
practice continues, that the peace will not be 
long protracted. 

So, without going into the causes of the con- 
16 



FROM C^SAR TO KAISER 

flict, within five years after her seven-weeks' 
triumph over Austria we find Prussia at the 
throat of France. Now, France, as we know, 
is south of Prussia, and so if we knew nothing 
of the history of Europe except that militarism 
is constantly moving northward, and if we knew 
nothing of the history of France during the 
half -century succeeding the downfall of Napo- 
leon, we should be quite safe in assuming that 
the spirit of liberty was there leavening the 
people ; in other words, that the light which we 
have seen breaking over Italy, and which al- 
ways follows the dark shadow of militarism, was 
shining more or less brightly over her Northern 
neighbor. And such was the case. With all 
their restoration of Bourbonism, the powerful 
coalition of reactionaries had not been able to 
stamp out in France the love of liberty and the 
movement toward a freer government. 

Such was the condition of things in the coun- 
try west of the Rhine when the Prussian thun- 
derbolt fell upon her. From this shock France 
rebounded toward republicanism, and Prussia 
even further toward that system of imperial au- 
thority against which her Socialists have ever 
since battled in vain. The German empire, 
homogeneous, or almost so in a racial way, in 

17 



THE WOELD STORM AND BEYOND 

those deeper elements that go to make up her 
character, is as much of a dual empire as Aus- 
tria-Hungary, only in the former case the two 
empires, instead of lying side by side, as in the 
latter, are superimposed the one upon the other. 
And it was probably as much for the purpose of 
holding and welding these two antagonistic, tur- 
bulent empires together as it was to establish 
and protect pan-Germanism in Europe that the 
stupendous machine that is now in motion was 
wrought out. Socialism in Germany, the lower 
layer in the dual empire of which the upper layer 
is the war party, or the Government, is the in- 
dustrial projection of that political Revolution 
which more than a hundred years ago shook 
France, and indeed all Europe, to its founda- 
tions. 

To perceive the truth of this statement, we 
need only lay side by side those pages of history 
dealing with the rise of the Third Estate in 
France with those later pages which describe 
the revolt of the working-classes in Germany. It 
is the same struggle transferred to the cities. 
Karl Marx is clearly the Rousseau of the Revo- 
lution beyond the Rhine. And those able men, 
his contemporaries and successors, who have 
wrought out into an exact science and fearlessly 

18 



FROM C^SAR TO KAISER 

disseminated througliout the empire tlie new 
economics, bear a resemblance to the French en- 
cyclopedists too striking to be mistaken. In 
the later case, it is the same fierce light turned 
not upon the state, but upon the strongholds of 
capital. 

But we are living in an age of speed, when 
revolutions accomplish in decades what for- 
merly required centuries. Kaiser Wilhelm is 
evidently the Grand Monarch overtaken by the 
deluge. The expression, "I am the state," fits 
quite as well in the mouth of William II as in 
that of Louis XIV. 

But the parallel does not stop here. The 
Bourbon, who seems to have been born with the 
idea that he was France, soon got it into his 
- head that he was Europe. And this idea re- 
mained there and grew until the disillusionment 
came at the sword-points of the surrounding 
nations, with the help of England. And just as 
for a time the Bourbons were able to deceive the 
people into identifying their interests with that 
of their rulers, so it would seem that the deadly 
parallel is projecting itself into the future. 

But there came a time in France when the 
people awoke to the true meaning of what was 
going on. Then all those forces which had 

19 



THE WOELD STORM AND BEYOND 

fought the imaginary enemy on the borders 
turned terribly toward their real enemy in Paris. 
We all know the result, how the whole upper 
crust of France, with its gilded and shivering 
aristocracy, was shattered and blown into frag- 
ments. 

It is of course not to be expected, in following 
out a parallel of this sort, that the comparison 
will hold good in minor details. We do not ex- 
pect, for instance, to find the Kaiser toying with 
a Montespan or a Pompadour, or to see at Pots- 
dam the idle courtiers that thronged the court 
at Versailles. Times have changed. The del- 
uge of democracy has wrought wonders. The 
spirit of work, long confined to the masses, is 
electrifying even the upper classes. And so far 
as their social duties will permit, even monarchs 
are becoming workmen. Of no nation is this so 
true as it is of Germany. Potsdam is not only 
the royal residence, but it is also the commercial 
office of the empire. But we must not be misled 
by these facts. We must not imagine, because 
the German Emperor and his courtiers have 
gone to work, that what is happening in Europe 
to-day never happened before. 

It would be strange indeed if the Kaiser, 
shrewd man that he is, and familiar as he is 

20 



FROM C^SAR TO KAISER 

with tlie disasters that overtook the royal auto- 
crats on the other side of the Rhine, should re- 
peat the blunders that brought down those dis- 
asters. The later Bourbons saw the approach 
of the deluge, but lifted no hand to stay its com- 
ing. Enough for them if only they could bum 
the fragrant candle and get away before the 
storm should break. Even the Grand Monarch 
was something of a decadent. But the Hohen- 
zollerns are not the Bourbons. William 11 is a 
man of business, and business imparts alertness, 
develops the faculty of organization and deci- 
sion. And the decision to which the Kaiser has 
come, to which he probably came years ago, is 
that something must be done to save his regime 
from the rising waters of German socialism. 

To accomplish this he must begin where all 
monarchs begin. The people must be deceived 
into identifying their interest with that of the 
reigning house. Second, they must be educated, 
for years if necessary, to see that the Kaiser is 
arming the empire not to maintain his own me- 
dieval regime, but to save the workshops of the 
fatherland, and this in the face of the fact that 
hand in hand with peace German trade has been 
conquering the world! And third, if the plan 
is to succeed, the machine must be set in motion 

21 



THE WORLD STORM AND BEYOND 

from the outside, else the mask falls off and the 
whole ghastly thing is laid bare. 

Compared with this subtle and far-reaching 
conspiracy against the rising spirit of the Ger- 
man people and the peace and freedom of Eu- 
rope, compared especially with the thorough- 
ness of the preparation, how shallow and loose 
the statesmanship of the Bourbons! Indeed, 
the coup that has just been sprung by the hand 
of Austria is Napoleonic, with the hue possibly 
of that madness which characterized the Corsi- 
can in his last days. For while it is perhaps too 
early to forecast with any degree of certainty 
the outcome of the gigantic game, signs are not 
wanting that the Grerman emperor, like the 
French emperor before him, is being used de- 
spite himself by those very forces which he im- 
agines he is thwarting, and is struggling blind- 
folded for the emancipation of Europe. 

It is right in keeping with this theory of the 
northward movement of militarism in Europe, 
and is another proof of the correctness of this 
theory, that in this critical moment when mili- 
tarism is threatening the whole Continent, Italy 
should have dropped away from the Triple Alli- 
ance and arrayed herself in heart at least with 
France. And that she should have been able 

22 



FROM C^SAR TO KAISER 

even thus far to hold herself aloof from the 
conflict is further proof that a better day is 
dawning for the South. And it is obvious that 
the present war in which France is engaged is in 
all essentials a replica of that war which, almost 
half a century ago, Italy waged with Austria. 
Aside from the fact that it is a Latin people 
against a German people, it is also true that the 
underlying motive is the same. If Italy's was a 
struggle for freedom, so also is the present 
struggle of France, not of course for freedom 
from oppressive institutions, but, what amounts 
almost to the same thing, from a permanent and 
well-grounded fear of such oppression. And 
unless signs are misleading, that aggressive 
militarism which through the centuries we have 
seen come up from the south and move with peri- 
odic pauses and conflicts to the north, is prepar- 
ing for another migration northward. Indeed, 
it is not at all improbable that this desperate 
and apparently aggressive movement of Csesar- 
ism in Europe is the taking up of baggage for a 
retreat. 

And there is only one country left on the Con- 
tinent with anything like the character of people 
and the width of dimensions demanded where 
this monstrous institution can find refuge. And 

23 



THE WOELD STORM AND BEYOND 

that is Eussia. From centuries of slaughter of 
the Latin and the Teuton, will it find a home 
with the Slav and with him round out its life? 
In the following pages I shall try to throw some 
light upon this question in so far as it concerns 
the character of the Eussian people. As for the 
Eussian government, no one of any intelligence 
is misled as to its real attitude toward Caesarism 
by its alinement in the present contest. If the 
Czar is striking at the Kaiser, it is not of course 
because he is opposed to what the Kaiser stands 
for. Czar and Kaiser, as we have seen, mean 
Caesar, and the two emperors, cousins by blood, 
are full brothers in politics. It has been 
pointed out time and again that their rivalry 
is racial, the Slav against the Teuton. There 
is doubtless some truth in this ; but the rivalry 
is also personal. There has never been, and 
there is not now, room enough in Europe for two 
Caesars. One must give way. Just as fifty 
years ago in the contest for the same imperial 
primacy within the German race one of the 
claimants was obliged to give way. In that case, 
true to the movement we are tracing, the North- 
ern champion proved the stronger. Indeed, the 
position of Grermany to-day bears a striking 
resemblance to the position then occupied by 

24 



FROM C^SAR TO KAISER 

Austria. Then, as we have seen, Italy, to the 
south, was fighting with Austria for freedom, 
while Prussia, to the north, was trying to wrest 
from the same power the ancient scepter of the 
Holy Roman Empire, which, as an idea at least, 
still rested in the hands of the Hapsburgs. 
Now France, to the south, is battling to main- 
tain its freedom against Germany, while Russia, 
to the north, is snatching at that old scepter 
which Prussia won from Austria. 

The movement as well as the character of 
militarism in Europe is well expressed in the 
person of Napoleon Bonaparte. Born an Ital- 
ian, operating all his life from France, and now 
for years the openly avowed inspiration of the 
leaders of Germany, seldom has it fallen to the 
lot of one man as it fell to the lot of Napoleon 
Bonaparte to dominate his own age and to 
chart the drift of two thousand years. Having 
passed through her militaristic period, Italy 
could not use him, and so he was obliged to move 
northward to France as he now moves north- 
ward to Germany, to northern Germany. 

It is greatly to be hoped, yet possibly, at least 
just now, hardly to be expected, that the German 
people, intelligent as they are and thoroughly 
versed as they are in the evolution of history, 

25 



THE WORLD STORM AND BEYOND 

will see the real meaning of the struggle in which 
they are engaged and will avail themselves of 
the present crisis to exorcise forever the spirit 
of the Caesars. They are in the throes, if they 
only knew it, not of a foreign war, but of an in- 
ternal revolution, and the mighty sounds of ap- 
proaching armies all about them are simply the 
rest of Europe coming to their aid. Their long 
and strenuous struggle for liberty is on the 
point of bearing fruit, for the freer institutions 
beyond the Rhine seem likely to be extended. On 
the other hand, the unparalleled social and in- 
dustrial progress which the Grerman people have 
made in the short half-century of their national- 
ity, and that, too, in the face of an antiquated 
and repressive political system, bids fair at last 
to overflow their boundaries and spread all over 
Europe. Defeat at this price, if defeat must 
come, is victory, just as the defeat of Napoleon 
was a victory for the French. For this contest 
also is a contest not of arms, but of ideas, and 
that nation whose ideas shall come out of this 
great threshing best fitted to undertake the so- 
cial and industrial reorganization for which all 
Europe is waiting will, whether in victory or de- 
feat, be ultimately and essentially the winner. 



26 



RUSSIA AND THE OPEN SEA 



II 

EUSSIA AND THE OPEN SEA 

WHATEVER may happen to tlie other na- 
tions whose swords are crossed in the 
great conflict that is now waging, no one expects 
that the destiny of the colossus of the North will 
be seriously interfered with. France may be 
overrun or a similar fate may overtake Grer- 
many, Austria may disappear from the map or 
the British empire may be broken up; but be- 
tween Eussia and any great harm still lie those 
impenetrable spaces where the armies of Na- 
poleon lie buried — those armies that Europe has 
not forgotten. When the swords that are now 
clashing are put up and the game is over, Ger- 
many and Austria or England and France may 
divide the present, but the future belongs to 
Russia. 

Let us look for a moment at the history and 
aspirations of this great people, and see how she 
lies with relation to things that are happening 
and to things that will happen when the wounds 
that are now opening are healed, and the chil- 

29 



THE WOELD STORM AND BEYOND 

dren of fathers that are now dying have become 
the masters of Europe. 

For centuries the Slav has lived and, so far 
as the rest of the world is concerned, still lives 
just beyond the horizon. There is about him 
something of the wonder with which our fore- 
fathers regarded the hyperboreans, something 
of the awe with which dwellers in valleys look 
upon high mountains, upon the Alps or the 
Himalayas. He appears and disappears, strikes 
or is ever about to strike. He is the Apache 
of Europe and Asia, the Ishmael of the Cau- 
casian race. To the south of a ragged line 
touching the civilizations ancient and modern 
of virtually the whole earth, eyes are eternally 
fixed upon the North, wondering where he will 
appear next. Indeed, this anxiety is a kindred 
bond uniting the heterogeneous peoples of the 
temperate zone of the two continents. To find 
anything like it we must go back to the days 
when along borders much less extensive tb3 
people of the Eoman empire looked toward the 
north, where a similar menace was gathering. 
While the Swede is out on his watch-towers in 
the west, the Japanese is patrolling his coast, 
and between them what motley sentinels move to 
and fro, what strange tongues are naming the 

30 



RUSSIA AND THE OPEN SEA 

common fear ! Where will lie appear next? In 
what numbers will he come! And how much 
land will he seize? Not a year passes, not a 
month probably, that the matter is not up in 
some cabinet or other of Europe or Asia. And 
a good guess is fame for any statesman. 

But what scant material to work upon ! One 
could take a map of the earth, and in nine cases 
out of ten lay his finger upon those spots where 
England or France or Germany or any other 
of the leading commercial nations will appear, 
provided he knows where, in unappropriated re- 
gions, rich mines or timber or reservoirs of oil 
will be found. But what of the Slav, who is still 
almost wholly outside the pale of the commercial 
age? With him it is enough if it is only land. 
There are times, of course, when even England 
will pick up a piece of territory that is not too 
dangerously attached to a strong nation — a 
piece that has none of the allurements I have 
mentioned. But if you will look closely, you 
will see that it has at least population. For a 
market for finished products is quite as essential 
as sources of raw material. But Russia, stu- 
pidly unmoved, it would seem, by these refine- 
ments, gathers up with the same avidity the 
mountain fastnesses of the Caucasus and the 

31 



THE WORLD STORM AND BEYOND 

cities of China. This it is more than anything 
else that makes it difficult for the statesmen of 
commercial nations to understand Russian di- 
plomacy or to predict with any certainty just 
where along her interminable borders the Cos- 
sack will appear. To know, as every one knows, 
that Russia is seeking always an outlet to the 
sea, to the open sea, is of little help. For ex- 
perience has shown that she is quite as capable 
of moving upon one a thousand miles away as 
upon one within sight. And coupled with the 
capacity for a quick stroke, like the cobra, what 
glacier-like patience! Other nations must 
hurry or stand still,, choose either the present 
or the future; Russia can do both. Hence the 
wonder and the perplexity, the eagerness to 
thwart her, and yet the certainty of ultimate de- 
feat. For while other nations are obliged to 
conquer peoples, Russia can seep out from her 
own land and absorb them. 

What is it that has made Russia the great 
enigma, the stranger both to Europe and Asia! 
Beyond doubt the fact that she is herself neither 
one. To the Asiatic she is something of a Eu- 
ropean ; to the European she is something of an 
Asiatic : yet to both she is not wholly either the 
one or the other. She is like a great tree with 

32 



RUSSIA AND THE OPEN SEA 

her ancient trunk rising up out of the Caucasus, 
the early home of the Slavic people, and tower- 
ing up into the ices of the North, and with her 
branches extending east and west into the sun- 
rise and the sunset. And yet her leaves are 
neither of the East nor of the West. She is 
white like the European, and yet the brown man 
and the yellow man understand her. And un- 
der her immense shade what multicolored gar- 
ments, what a strange cluster of tongues ! Peo- 
ple of the older races of Asia have often ob- 
served that the cosmopolitanism even of the 
Briton,, the European world-man, is a matter of 
manners, the affected suavity of the drummer, 
whereas the Slav, certainly that type which the 
great mother throws out in inexhaustible thou- 
sands along her borders, is hon vivant with all 
the races and classes of the earth. The other 
nations of Europe have made the acquaintance 
of alien peoples, but Russia — ^Russia, it would 
seem, has always known them. Their small 
lives found comfortable places in her vastness, 
their children are at home in her great lap. 

It behooves the nations, especially those that 
expect to travel the road of the future, to learn 
something of Russia, as it behooved the Roman 
to learn something of the Gaul. They cannot 

33 



THE WORLD STORM AND BEYOND 

afford to go on drawing the sword whenever she 
appears. But right now, when new alinements 
are being made for the future, they should be- 
gin that rapprochement which will admit Russia 
into the family of nations not as a menace, but 
as a friend. At least we here in America, aloof, 
it is to be hoped, from the prejudices of the 
Old World — ^we, young as Russia is young, het- 
erogeneous as Russia is heterogeneous, and en- 
tering upon our world life as Russia is entering 
upon hers, should without delay turn with 
open and friendly mind to this great stranger. 
We should not be satisfied with a report of her 
crimes delivered to us over the cables of other 
nations, or even with the reading of her novels, 
or the viewing of her dances. We ourselves 
would not be satisfied with a judgment of our 
own country based upon such materials. We 
should try to find out something not only of 
what she is, but of what she is trying to be. 
And to understand her, three things at least are 
indispensable : first, a general knowledge of Eu- 
ropean peoples and institutions ; second, a simi- 
lar knowledge, smattering at least, of the great 
peoples of the near East and the far East, who 
for generations have felt the push of this human 
glacier along that ever-southward-moving line 

34 



RUSSIA AND THE OPEN SEA 

between the Black Sea and tlie China wall ; and 
thirdly, a knowledge, of what two such ingredi- 
ents will produce in the way of a third. It is 
this last, of course, that has made Eussia the 
despair of travelers and psychologists. For 
human chemistry, while it may be, as some claim 
it is, a science, is as yet a science of the future. 
*' Scratch a Russian and find a Tartar" is a for- 
mula too evidently drafted for the convenience 
of those who contemplate a summer sojourn in 
this immense land, a reed too slight at least for 
statesmen to lean upon. 

But let us ''scratch" this Russian, and this 
Tartar, too, and see if we can discover what it 
is that has made him the world figure he is and 
that threatens to make him the figure of the 
world, though at present he is only beginning to 
be seen behind the towering shadows of Ger- 
many and France and England that for cen- 
turies have filled the horizon. 

Looking first, then, into his past, we find dur- 
ing the short thousand years that, properly 
speaking, he has occupied the stage of history, 
three events stand out as of prime importance. 
One of them is a call to Europe, another a call 
from Asia, while a third has tied him to that un- 
settled region between Europe and Asia, that 

35 



THE WORLD STORM AND BEYOND 

boiling-pot of the races where the sword for cen- 
turies has never dried and which has at last set 
all Europe aflame. 

The first of these events is an invasion, if we 
may call it so — an invasion of that same Scandi- 
navian race whose vikings at about the same 
time were pouring down into England and 
France, down even into Sicily and southern 
Italy. But upon these latter lands they came 
as brigands, sword in hand, at first for booty, 
and then for permanent homes in the comfort- 
able sunshine which they found there. But into 
Russia, so the story goes, they entered not as 
robbers, but upon invitation, and that, too, not 
as the Saxons were invited into Britain, to help 
stem the rising tide of rapacious neighbors, but 
to aid in the establishment of an orderly govern- 
ment. It was an extraordinary procedure, cer- 
tainly, and one which should not be forgotten; 
for here we see for the first time, and that, too, 
far back in the twilight, the hand of the Slav 
held out in brotherly friendship, asking help. 
* ' Our land is great and fruitful, but it lacks or- 
der and justice; come and take possession and 
govern us." Significant appeal! 

Just how much of the subsequent history of 
Russian conquest is due to this fiery drop of 

36 



RUSSIA AND THE OPEN SEA 

viking blood which, infused in a somewhat 
larger quantity into Britain, has goaded her out 
over the seas into every comer of the globe, it is 
of course impossible to say. In Russia the 
Northmen never acquired that complete and per- 
manent control which they secured in Britain. 
For the expanding Scandinavian race, instead of 
following in the path of Rurik, preferred to turn 
their ships to the south, and Russia was again 
cut off. 

When next she appears, it is again with hands 
outstretched, not this time for governors, but for 
teachers. The Dark Ages, which had come over 
Europe with the fall of the Roman empire, were 
giving way in the South to the light of civiliza- 
tion, and missionaries, who were wandering 
everywhere, finally reached Russia. But when 
they came, they came, unfortunately, not from 
Rome only, but from Constantinople also. For 
the great schism was already a fact, and there 
was now an Eastern as well as a Western 
church. 

Probably nothing in all the history of Russia 
has so affected her destiny, and possibly also the 
ultimate destiny of Europe and Asia, as this 
great schism in the South. For more than any- 
thing else, possibly more than all other things 

37 



THE WOELD STORM AND BEYOND 

combined, this it is that has opened the chasm 
between Russia and the rest of Europe. For 
when once the ambassadors whom the ruling 
prince Vladimir sent out to canvass the reli- 
gions of the world with a view to determining 
which was the best for the Russian people, re- 
turned and reported in favor of the Orthodox, 
or Greek Catholic, with its seat at Constanti- 
nople, and the prince indorsed this recommenda- 
tion, from that moment the face of Russia was 
turned toward the East. From that moment 
she began to be a stranger. Henceforth her 
music, her architecture, her government, her 
whole national character indeed, began gradu- 
ally to be molded not after the models of Eu- 
rope, but after those of Asia. Henceforth there 
was to be misunderstanding between the rest 
of Europe and their Northern neighbor — a mis- 
understanding which is utterly incomprehen- 
sible without this explanation. For the Slavic 
people are full cousins of the German, of the 
French, of the English, of all the great peoples 
of Europe ; for all these, including the Slav, are 
Aryan. 

This, then, is the seed out of which have 
arisen those tremendous complications which 
to-day embroil the world. 

38 



EUSSIA AND THE OPEN SEA 

The last event, second only in importance to 
the one I have just mentioned as far as its effect 
upon the character and institutions of Russia is 
concerned, came as the result not of a peaceful 
sending of ambassadors among the civilized na- 
tions to inquire into and report upon things 
which might be of value to the Russian people, 
but as a sudden and irresistible deluge of wild 
barbarians from the East, the horde of that 
greatest of all conquerors and autocrats, Jeng- 
hiz Khan. To Europe, waking to the first rays 
of the Renaissance, the coming of these savages 
was as though the mineral kingdom should sud- 
denly rise and attack trees and grain and grass. 
In the South, however, thanks to the knowledge 
and practice of Roman arms, the plague was 
stayed and finally beaten off; but over Russia, 
disorganized and cut off from this advantage, 
the horde swept on, and for more than two cen- 
turies raped and pillaged and oppressed at will. 
And all this while the rest of Europe, to which 
at this time a half-Christian was more execrable 
than a heathen, looked on with unconcern, pos- 
sibly with gratification that God at last was pun- 
ishing the heresy of her neighbor. During these 
centuries of outrage such as Italy never experi- 
enced in the darkest days of the Goths and 

39 



THE WOELD STORM AND BEYOND 

the Vandals, the spirit of the Russian people 
was broken. Little wonder that among these 
cousins of the Gaul, the Saxon, and the German, 
revolutions rise and spend themselves in foam. 

This was the call from Asia — a call that has 
since been answered even to the shores of the 
Pacific. 

With the ebbing of this dark tide that had 
overwhelmed her, at last Russia awoke to the 
fact that she was cut off from the rest of Eu- 
rope; or at least one man awoke and, looking 
about him, became aware that during the long 
night of his country's enslavement a new day 
had dawned in the South, while in the North 
all was torpor and darkness. What Alfred the 
Great is to early Britain, that Peter the Great, 
in his crude way, is to Russia. If ever a race 
of people found adequate expression in one per- 
son, that race was the Slavic race in their great 
czar. As an acorn enfolds an oak, the type of a 
great forest, so Peter the Great enfolded the 
Russian people. Into him they have flowed 
from the twilight of time, and from him they 
have gone out to the ends of the earth. And 
this was one of his dreams, that his country 
might have ample boundaries. 

But wide boundaries are not greatness. Had 
40 



RUSSIA AND THE OPEN SEA 

Peter imagined that they were, he would prob- 
ably have taken his place in history among those 
secondary men whose names are known simply 
as conquerors. But it was primarily of the Rus- 
sian people he was thinking, of the Russian peo- 
ple taking their place and marching in the van 
with the other peoples of Europe. Former 
czars had made pilgrimages to Asia, to pros- 
trate themselves at the feet of their Tartar mas- 
ters; Peter's pilgrimage was in the opposite di- 
rection, to Prussia, to Holland, to England. 
Here, then, we have a third instance of that 
Slavic hunger for higher things and that willing- 
ness to learn from her more advanced brothers, 
uttering itself in this case not in invitations to a 
neighboring people for ** order and justice," or 
in ambassadors seeking the fittest religion, but 
in a journey of the czar himself for the purpose 
of bringing back to Russia the much-needed 
civilization of Europe. 

Only the keenest realization of the immense 
chasm that yawned between these countries and 
his own can account for the tremendous energy 
with which this man, single-handed and in the 
face of such opposition as few reformers have 
ever encountered, set to work to dispel the bar- 
barism of his people. Having discovered civili- 

41 



THE WOELD STORM AND BEYOND 

zation and having tasted its snnsMne, lie deter- 
mined that his country should share it and that 
never again should she go back into the. dark- 
ness. Soldier, statesman, absorber and dissemi- 
nator of knowledge, builder, captain of industry, 
brutal, of course, as his age was brutal, but 
with a brutality aimed mainly at the great goal 
toward which he was striving, it is exceedingly 
doubtful if there can be found in all history an- 
other ruler who wrought so strenuously and per- 
sistently for the elevation of his people as didi 
this great czar. Petrograd, that "window into 
Europe '^ which he built, and through which 
he expected the sunlight would shine forever — 
Petrograd, rising out of the fiUed-up swamps of 
the Neva, is only a symbol of these gigantic 
labors. No wonder the Russian people think 
of his spirit as still with them, shaping and di- 
recting their destiny. 

Unfortunately, the work so energetically be- 
gun has not been carried on. With the excep- 
tion of the great Catharine, who introduced into 
Russia the arts of Europe, as Peter the Great 
had introduced the mechanics, subsequent czars 
have, for the most part, been cast in a different 
mold. Russia is still the backward brother of 
Europe. The short day has given place to twi- 

42 



RUSSIA AND THE OPEN SEA 

light. The ''window into Europe" has been 
closed. There is probably a wider gap between 
the Russia of to-day and those enlightened lands 
which Peter visited than there was before he be- 
gan his work. 

What is the reason for this? Why is it, for 
instance, that Russia is shoulder to shoulder 
with the most advanced nations in rifles and 
behind the most backward in schools? Along 
her borders, where her armies mingle with the 
armies of other nations, she seems one of them. 
But pass into the interior that the great Peter 
labored so long and so prodigiously to waken 
and transform, and you have passed, as far as 
the great mass of the people is concerned, from 
a world of stir into a world of slumber, from the 
age of the biplane into an age not far removed 
from that of the early Gauls. What, I repeat, 
is the explanation of this tragedy, this retarded 
growth of millions upon millions of people? 

It is easy enough to lay it upon the czars, 
upon the bureaucracy, that wide-reaching, nev- 
er-relaxing hand within whose grasp generation 
after generation has lain benighted and help- 
less; but there is another cause, one of which 
possibly even czarism and bureaucracy are re- 
sults. 

43 



THE WORLD STORM AND BEYOND 

Peter the Great had a third dream, one which 
lay as close if not closer to his heart than either 
of the other two, and one which his country has 
ever since labored with vast zeal and patience to 
fulfil — a dream of the open sea! 

It is astonishing that this inland-born man 
should have heard almost from his birth the call 
of the distant oceans. It is pathetic to watch 
him in his early boyhood, like some interior- 
exiled viking, groping for his native waters. If 
one can tell him something of the sea, with what 
hunger he clasps him to his bosom ! A toy boat 
upon a canal near his home, and he is restless 
until a whole flotilla is launched ; and even this 
only adds to his hunger. He must have larger 
boats that he can manage and sail. And once 
he has learned this upon a neighboring lake, 
there wakes within him the call of the seas. 

Immediately upon attaining his majority, he 
starts for the north, to Archangel, and is the 
first of all the rulers of his land to look upon 
wide waters. And having looked upon them, he 
resolves that his country, too, shall look upon 
them ; shall, like other nations, have ports and 
ships and commerce. For even then Peter di- 
vined the meaning of the sea ; and straightway 
he set to work to learn the art of the sea, the 

44 



EUSSIA AND THE OPEN SEA 

construction and management of sMps. And 
how like a modem American he began, this czar 
of all the Eussias ! Just as before in learning 
the new art of European warfare, he had begun, 
this autocrat, as a drummer-boy in the regiment, 
that he might master the whole thing from top 
to bottom, so he began again at the bottom, 
sweeping the deck, serving in the cabin, fetching 
coals for the skipper's pipe. Then, and then 
only, up the masts. And in learning to build 
them it was the same, not with guides, but in a 
workman's blouse, in the shipyards of foreign 
lands. And from here came memorable words, 
which he wrote back — words which have ever 
since been the cry of his country, "It is not land 
I want, but water." Within a few years after 
his return home he had won for his people ports 
on the Baltic, the Black, and the Caspian. 

But why did Peter dream of the open sea? 
For the same reason that, from the dawn of 
time, humanity has dreamed of the sea. Land 
is existence, but water is life. The open sea 
is the open mind. The oceans are civiliza- 
tion. 

Watch the movements of the progressive 
races. It is from land to water, from water to 
wider water. First there are the rivers, like 

45 



THE WORLD STOEM AND BEYOND 

the Euphrates and the Nile, and the civilizations 
upon their banks are vastly superior to the civili- 
zations of the interiors. But once the seas are 
discovered and mastered, the civilizations of the 
rivers sink into second place, and nations like 
Greece and Rome wake into life. Then the 
oceans. And once the oceans are conquered, 
you have France and Germany and England. 

Suppose back there in the long ago, a naked 
sword had been laid across the mouths of the 
Euphrates and the Nile. And suppose human- 
ity, having discovered an overland route to the 
southern peninsulas of Europe, had found bar- 
ring their further march another sword across 
the Strait of Gibraltar. And suppose that 
thereafter all overland routes to the oceans had 
been blocked, say, with long lines of cannon. 
If the democracy of Greece never arose on the 
Euphrates, and the strong type of the independ- 
ent Roman never developed on the Nile, or if, 
in the second case, that sane, stable constitu- 
tional government that is the pride of England 
never bloomed in Greece, and the splendid edu- 
cational system that is the pride of Germany 
never flourished in Rome, upon which lands 
would the blame lie, upon those on the inside or 
upon those on the outside, upon those that found 

46 



RUSSIA AND THE OPEN SEA 

the sword across their path or upon those that 
laid it there 1 

Ahnost from the day that Peter the Great set 
forth to blaze for his country a way to the open 
sea Russia has found across her path the swords 
of virtually all the nations of Europe and Asia. 
And the sword most often confronting her in 
her march toward the open sea, toward free- 
dom, commerce, civilization, has been the sword 
of England, mistress of the seas. In the West, 
in the South, in the East, as a silent menace or a 
sweeping blade, leading the way or urging 
others on, but always there with unwavering 
purpose, is the sword of England — England, the 
Enlightener ! 

And what have been the consequences of this 
** caging the bear,'* as it is facetiously called in 
the chancelleries of Europe, this shutting out of 
Russia from intercourse with civilized nations 
and compelling her to be eternally the com- 
panion of barbarians'? Within a little more 
than half a century, to go back no further, there 
have been four great wars, every one of them, if 
we will only look behind the mask of diplomatic 
pretext, clearly traceable to this one cause, this 
arresting of a great people in its march toward 
civilization. 

47 



THE WOELD STOBM AND BEYOND 

First, there are the Crimean War, and the 
Eusso-Turkish War. Though the professed 
reason of these was to protect the Christians 
and pnt an end to Turkish atrocities in the Bal- 
kan States, no one familiar with the eternal 
pressure behind Eussian diplomacy can fail to 
see that the underlying motive of these two 
wars was the acquisition of Constantinople. In 
the Crimean War this ambition was thwarted 
by England, who, with the help of France and 
Sardinia, clasped hands with Turkey against 
Eussia, with the Moslem against the Christian, 
with the brown man against the white man. 
And all for the purpose of laying her sword 
across the Dardanelles and preventing Eussia 's 
exit to the Mediterranean. 

In the Eusso-Turkish War, after she had won 
from Turkey, by the Treaty of San Stefano, a 
protectorate over the Slavic Balkan States, 
whose liberation from Turkey she alone had se- 
cured, Eussia was forced by the European pow- 
ers, at the Berlin Congress, to withdraw, where- 
upon the spoils of the war were very largely 
seized by Austria, a power that had no racial 
connection whatever with the Balkan peoples 
and one that had lifted no hand to put a stop to 
the outrages of the Turk. 

48 



EUSSIA AND THE OPEN SEA 

It would be interesting to know what England 
thinks to-day of the statesmanship which she 
displayed in these two wars. Does she think it 
was a good bargain to exchange Eussia for Ger- 
many in Turkey and Asia Minor ? Is Germany, 
seeking land, a safer neighbor to India than 
Eussia would have been, seeking the open sea? 
Is it well for England to-day that for de- 
cades she has been the self-appointed protector 
of the Turk? 

If Eussia had been allowed to take Constanti- 
nople, which, had Europe not interfered, she 
could undoubtedly have done, there is no ques- 
tion that Europe would have escaped many of 
those troubles which have plagued her in the in- 
tervening years. For there is little doubt that 
Eussia would have policed Turkey on the one 
hand, and, on the other, who will say that she 
would not have kept peace in the Balkans f Not 
England, not Germany, but Eussia is the natural 
bridge between Europe and Asia, and by every 
consideration of race and religion and character 
is the logical power to keep order in the near 
East. For be it remembered, that not only the 
Balkan States but many of the provinces of 
Austria itself, are old Slavic territory and the 
people there are full brothers of the Eussians. 

49 



THE WORLD STORM AND BEYOND 

Indeed for years, thirty millions of Slavs have 
cried out to their elder brother for liberation 
from the Austrian yoke and other bordering 
millions for an ending of the Austrian menace. 
Bnt for the meddlesome interference of powers 
that had no rightful claim upon this territory, 
Russia would here have had her harbor, a small 
price, it would seem, for the elimination of those 
crimes which for more than half a century have 
shocked the civilized world. 

But with all the powers of Europe arrayed 
against her from the very beginning in the West, 
and now shut out in the South, Russia, as a last 
hope, was obliged to set forth on that long jour- 
ney across Asia to the far East. And there, 
strange to say, she was allowed her heart's de- 
sire — allowed, that is, to spend millions in the 
construction of her great harbor. Is England 
asleep? Are the nations of Europe aware of 
what is going on? Or is it that they have come 
to see that perhaps Russia has the same right 
to civilization as themselves? Not at all. The 
sword is a little late in appearing, that is all. 
And again we have a war, this time not with 
England, but with England's ally, Japan. 

And now we are in the midst of a fourth war 
as clearly traceable as are the other three to 

50 



RUSSIA AND THE OPEN SEA 

this fatuous determination to keep Eussia from 
the open sea. Or let us rather say this present 
war is the aftermath of the other three, the in- 
evitable aftermath. If Eussia were a less pow- 
erful nation than she is, or if the spirit of liberty 
were dead in the Slavic race, these three wars 
would probably have been sufficient. But with 
a territory three times as large as all the rest of 
Europe, with a population larger than that of 
England, France, and Germany combined, and 
of kindred blood with those nations that, despite 
every obstacle, have won their way to the oceans 
and a world life, it would have been strange in- 
deed had the Eussian people resigned them- 
selves to the barbarism of the steppes. Instead, 
she turns back to that old pass where for more 
than two centuries her dreams have centered 
and where, as we have seen, she logically be- 
longs, and with a vigor and determination 
worthy of her Aryan blood and the high aim for 
which she is battling, she begins once more her 
struggle for the open sea. And that which hap- 
pens is what always happens when every safety- 
valve through which a great people can express 
itself is closed. There is a rushing of mighty 
forces toward those weaker seams in the Bal- 
kans, and — the explosion ! 

51 



THE WOELD STOEM AND BEYOND 

It is fortunate that circumstances have again 
drawn Eussia Enropeward, for Eussia needs 
Europe, needs her now as in the past when more 
than once, as we have seen, she held her hands 
out toward the West. And Europe, aristo- 
cratic and suffering from a false conceit of 
cultural values, will sooner or later discover, 
as I shall try to show in my next chapter, that 
all these years she might have been learning as 
well as teaching. Especially is it fortunate not' 
only for Eussia and England, but for the world, 
that England has found it to her advantage to 
join hands with Eussia. England, whose life is 
a world life, can, if she will, become the door- 
opener for the Eussian people. England, the 
advanced, can become the tutor of Eussia, the 
backward. It is to be hoped that England real- 
izes her great opportunity, and will avail herself 
of the present crisis to take her sword from the 
path of the Eussian people in their march to- 
ward civilization. Credit may still be won by 
yielding to the inevitable. And it is inevitable. 
Turkey must go back to her ancient home in 
Asia where ample tracts of fertile land lie wait- 
ing her ; and Eussia must come out of her long 
prison to the free and open seas. 



52 



THE DEMOCEATIC RUSSIANS 



Ill 

THE DEMOCEATIC RUSSIANS 

OF all the changes that have come over the 
thought of the world within the last few 
decades, none is so remarkable as that which 
has to do with democracy. For centuries the 
word was confined to the narrow circle of poli- 
tics. A democracy was a kind of government ; 
a people was democratic if it had won for it- 
self the right to make its own laws. In the 
matter of religion they might have nothing to 
say; a few might own the land and enjoy the 
revenues of industry; there might be a dozen 
slaves to one free man; but if the citizens were 
free to meet and discuss public affairs and make 
laws, that country or city was a democracy, that 
people was a democratic people. It is un- 
doubtedly true that among millions, even in 
enlightened lands, this old habit of thought still 
persists, but gradually all over the world the 
new idea is making way. Certainly the leaders 
of humanity everywhere are aware of this revo- 
lution that has taken place, and the unparal- 

55 



THE WORLD STORM AND BEYOND 

leled changes which to-day are shaking and re- 
casting the world are due chiefly to this new 
vision that democracy means something more 
than government. 

Indeed, no word in the language has so en- 
larged its circle as has this word democracy. 
Faster than we have been able to follow it, the 
commotion has spread to the very bounds of 
life. State, church, school, industry, the rela- 
tions of man to man — all these are being jostled 
by this new unifying force. 

It is this sudden crowding of institutions 
upon the soul of man and their demand for new 
interpretation and reshaping that has set the 
ground to trembling beneath our feet, and has 
startled us into consciousness that the hour for 
great things has come. Democracy, the power 
of the people — that is the tocsin of the new age. 
Never before in the history of the world was 
it so important to get clearly in mind the mean- 
ing of a word as it is to-day to get the meaning 
of the word democracy. For upon our concep- 
tion of this one word depends not only the peace, 
but also the well-being of every man, woman and 
child of the generations to come. 

To start with, then, let us put away once for 
all the view of democracy as a phase of govern- 

56 



THE DEMOCRATIC RUSSIANS 

ment, and with mind and heart open and un- 
afraid journey out to the rim of that wide circle 
and see if we cannot spell out the larger meaning 
of this powerful word that for years has been 
making itself flesh among men, and is now 
through blood and death thrusting the old order 
into the trenches, there to be buried forever. 

Perhaps we can best arrive at what we are 
after if, instead of attempting to keep the whole 
world in view, we separate some part of it, 
as a chemist takes a part of an element and 
finds out the nature and laws of the whole, no 
matter how widely scattered it may be, whether 
it is buried in the earth or blazing in the gases 
of the farthest sun. And probably no land will 
afford a better illustration of the lights and 
shadows that play about the word democracy 
than will Russia, a country where, if looked 
at from the old point of view, no such thing 
as democracy exists. And it is true that 
writers on democracy have a way of ig- 
noring Russia or of using her as a dark 
background against which to bring out and 
emphasize the democratic institutions espe- 
cially of England and the United States. In 
these latter, it is pointed out, the power of the 
people is supreme ; whereas in Russia even the 

57 



THE WOELD STOEM AND BEYOND 

ideal of free institutions has not yet been born. 
Eussia and the czar are synonymous. But these 
writers also have a way of ignoring the larger 
circle, of using words with the meaning that 
attached to them a hundred years ago. To 
classify Eussia as an autocracy and then pass 
on, as is conunonly done, is just as unfair as it 
is to speak of England as a monarchy and stop 
at that. To find the heart of any land you must 
go below the government. Especially is this 
true in Eussia where under the iron regime of 
government lies a life peculiarly rich in color 
and in sentiment, a life of which we in the 
western world know far too little. 

Democracy is the passionate movement of a 
people toward power in every social endeavor, 
and it is the presence of this passion in a people, 
not their form of government, that determines 
their part in the future renovation of the world. 

With new test of democracy in hand, let us 
consider the Eussian people and what their rise 
to power augurs for the world. Is the Slav, 
whose light or shadow, as it is variously inter- 
preted, fills the northern horizon of Europe and 
Asia, a friend or a foe of democracy? That is 
by far the greatest question that has to do with 
the present war. If he is a foe, there can be no 

58 



THE DEMOCEATIC EUSSIANS 

permanent peace until lie is destroyed or put 
down. If he is a friend, there is hope for a 
long period of international cooperation and 
brotherhood. 

In the popular imagination, which invariably 
seizes upon a single point and rushes to a gen- 
eralization, three things stand out as represen- 
tative of Eussia: the czar, the Cossacks, and the 
Siberian penal system. The vast unknown 
spaces between these three, where the Eussian 
millions come and go have been filled in with 
these dark colors of oppression and crime to 
harmonize with the objects in the foreground; 
so that to-day, in almost every land, especially 
where the light of truth comes dimly through the 
painted windows of the newspapers, a Eussian, 
be he muzhik or grand duke, hand-worker or 
brain-worker, is looked upon as a police official 
in disguise, as a Siberian exile who knows the 
inner workings of the Eevolutionary movement, 
or at least as one of those wild riders about 
whom many hair-raising stories have been told. 
Just so for decades in the minds of the Euro- 
pean every American was either an Indian 
fighter or a cowboy. 

It is of course always the daredevil, roman- 
tic elements in a people that first catch atten- 

59 



THE WORLD STOEM AND BEYOND 

tion, and these are bandied about and played 
upon until they become national traits. How 
long it will take the Russian people to eradicate 
this popular misconception and stand forth in 
their true character, it would be hard to say. 
Possibly as long as it will take present-day 
America to live down in the minds of the Euro- 
pean the idea that every American is a brag- 
gart or a millionaire. Until a people has had 
an opportunity to create its own institutions, it 
is obviously unfair to draw conclusions with re- 
gard to their character from abuses connected 
with such institutions. Probably in no country 
on earth, as we shall see later, is the government 
so misrepresentative of the people as is the Rus- 
sian Government. The Siberian penal system, 
the Cossacks as a military institution, as well as 
all those persecutions with which the whole 
world has been made familiar, are creatures of 
the Government, not of the people. 

But it is the people we are here concerned 
with, for it is the qualities of the people that 
eventually will show forth in the institutions 
of Russia, just as the character of the Saxon 
has asserted itself in English institutions, and 
the character of the old Teuton that has molded 
Germany into what it is. 

60 



THE DEMOCRATIC RUSSIANS 

What, then, are the deeper traits of the Rus- 
sian muzhik, or peasant ? For what the Russian 
peasant is to-day, that, quickened and refined by 
education and by the stir of larger interests, will 
the Russian nation be to-morrow. What rudi- 
mentary idea of his own rights and the rights 
of others lies enfolded in the slow brain of this 
shaggy fellow of the steppes? 

Let us enter at random any one of the thou- 
sands of villages that dot the immeasurable 
spaces of this vast land and examine in the 
seed this world-shaper of to-morrow. 

Long ago, as far back as we can see, the Rus- 
sian had emerged from the wandering state of 
the nomad and had settled down to till the soil. 
And after twelve hundred years it is with this 
occupation that by far the largest part of the 
people is still engaged. Therefore it is the vil- 
lage, not the city, that is the center of national 
life, and it is to the village that we must go if 
we wish to get light upon Russia's future. 
Just here possibly has arisen the mistake we 
have made in our judgment of the Russian peo- 
ple. It is through Petrograd we have seen 
them, a glass too highly colored by foreign influ- 
ences, and the crimes of a corrupt aristocracy 
to afford a fair view of a people whose life from 

61 



THE WOELD STORM AND BEYOND 

time immemorial has been one witli the open 
fields. 

The first thing that strikes ns is that the Eus- 
sian village is a democracy similar to the Saxon 
village of early England. Bnt in the Saxon 
there has always been an element which rebelled 
against social control. The Saxon is by nature 
an individualist. He is willing to take his 
chances in a general mix-up. And therefore it 
is that at the earliest opportunity he threw off 
the shackles of collective ownership. In that 
long and successful assault which the barons of 
England made upon the people's land, and 
which I shall treat more at length in the follow- 
ing chapter, the Englishman fell far short of that 
unconquerable spirit of resistance and counter- 
assault which we think of as the natural reaction 
of the Saxon to injustice. Had the aggression 
been political, there is no doubt that he would 
have shown his old spirit. It is this inability 
of the Saxon to comprehend the larger meaning 
of democracy that has made England what it 
is — a people willing to see their land taken over 
by the barons, though it means starvation for 
themselves. For this is right in line with the 
Saxon theory of the rights of the individual, 
whereas group control is slavery. The wide- 

62 



THE DEMOCRATIC RUSSIANS 

spread poverty in which England finds herself 
to-day is due to this excessive individualism. 
The age of cooperation has come, and the Briton 
cannot adjust himself. He will starve, hut he 
will not give up his lords. 

Let us now pass into Russia, the land of 
autocracy. Here we see an exactly opposite de- 
velopment. Instead of the baron absorbing the 
property of the commune, the commune is suc- 
ceeding to the property of the baron. It is the 
village, not the individual, that owns the land, 
and at irregular intervals redistributes the land, 
though not the homes, among the members of 
the commune, or mir, as it is called, — every fam- 
ily is a member, and is represented by its head — 
according to the size and the respective needs of 
the families. And there is here none of that in- 
stinctive rebellion on the part of the individuals 
composing it, but, on the contrary, a submis- 
sion to its will which to-day, to any man of 
Germanic blood, is irritating and inconceivable. 
While in Russia, too, there is poverty, this con- 
dition is at least not due to the fact that the 
people are outcasts from the land. That is the 
chief difference, one might say, between Russia 
and the *' civilized" nations, namely, that 
whereas in the former the poverty of the people 

63 



THE WOELD STORM AND BEYOND 

is due to the Government, to wliat it has done 
and what it has left undone, conditions in the 
latter are due to the people themselves. And 
therefore while in Eussia education and the re- 
sultant political changes may remedy the condi- 
tion, in the more "advanced" nations an im- 
provement can be brought about only by a social 
revolution. And it is worth mentioning in pass- 
ing that the starost, or head, of the Eussian vil- 
lage never seeks the office, but has it thrust upon 
him, another illustration of the difference be- 
tween the mild Slav and the assertive Saxon. 

Though unquestionably there are evils con- 
nected with this system of agricultural com- 
munism — ^many of these could undoubtedly be 
eliminated or at least lessened by the establish- 
ment of schools — consider what it means for a 
people throughout the length and breadth of a 
great land to own their homes, rude though 
these homes may be, and a few acres of land to 
which, if for any reason they have left them, 
they may return in their old age or during those 
times when work has become scarce in the large 
centers of population. Is there any compen- 
sation for this in the consciousness enjoyed by 
the expropriated masses of the English people, 
and other people as well, that at least they have 

64 



THE DEMOCEATIC EUSSIANS 

remained loyal to the sacred principles of indi- 
vidual freedom? 

No better illustration of the fundamental dif- 
ference between the Saxon and the Slav can be 
found than that afforded by the respective ways 
in which Saxon America solved the slave prob- 
lem and Slavic Eussia the serf problem. Pass- 
ing over the fact that in America it required 
half a century of the most active propaganda to 
convince the people, even the people of the 
North, that slavery was wrong, whereas in Eus- 
sia no such extensive agitation was required, 
we come to the still wider chasm that yawns be- 
tween the ways in which, after their emancipa- 
tion, the slave and the serf were treated in their 
respective countries. So obsessed is the Saxon 
mind with the idea that freedom is a matter of 
politics that it seemed even to the abolitionist 
that ample justice had been done the negro 
when, after his liberation, he was given the 
vote. In Eussia, on the other hand, where the 
people are unpractised in politics and see things 
rather in their social aspect, the permanent free- 
dom of the serf seemed to depend not upon 
the franchise, but upon the essentials of liveli- 
hood. Therefore, while the armies of the North 
at the point of the bayonet were enforcing the 

65 



THE WOELD STOEM AND BEYOND 

negro's riglit to the ballot, tlie Eussian Gov- 
ernment was quietly endowing its fifty million 
serfs with land. And when we remember that 
in both cases the emancipated peoples were a 
childlike people, the supreme folly of the Saxon- 
American becomes apparent. And he himself 
has become aware of this, or rather half aware 
of it; for while he has reversed his policy, he 
has reversed it only half-way. He has recov- 
ered the vote which he gave to the negro, but 
the latter 's right to some part of the land which 
he has tilled for centuries the Saxon-American 
will not concede. And the reason why he will 
not concede it is as clear as day: the Anglo- 
Saxon is inherently an aristocrat. 

But the vast energies of Eussia are employed 
not solely in agriculture, though it is her tre- 
mendous resources in this respect that have 
made possible the enormous expenditures that 
have been required for the building of her great 
railroad system and the development of her 
gigantic military organization. Along with her 
field labor there goes on, especially during the 
six months when, owing to the severity of the 
climate, field labor is out of the question, that 
variety of craft employment which is necessary 
to supply the simple wants of an agricultural 

66 



THE DEMOCRATIC RUSSIANS 

people. And here again is emphasized that fun- 
damental difference between the Russian people 
and the peoples of the Grermanic race which we 
have just seen. 

In studying the evolution of industry among 
the Germanic peoples, much has been made of 
the gild. And wisely so, for out of this small 
institution has unfolded the whole vast and com- 
plex structure of modem industry. All those 
elements of efficiency which have made it possi- 
ble for this race to conquer the markets of the 
world, as well as all those abuses which, in their 
aggregate, have created among these peoples 
a menacing proletariat, lie in embryo in the old 
gild system. It requires only the most casual 
acquaintance with the growth of this institu- 
tion, as it developed first in the merchant gild 
and later in the craft gild, to discover in it the 
germ of that plutocratic aristocracy against 
which the forces of socialism are making head. 

As far back as the very beginning of Eng- 
lish trade the right to buy and sell was enjoyed 
exclusively by the owners of property, just as 
until within recent times the right to vote de- 
pended upon a similar qualification. And these 
landowners who controlled the trade of the 
towns came very shortly to control the towns 

67 



THE WORLD STORM AND BEYOND 

themselves and tlie populations of the towns. 
Inside a baronial feudalism there grew up a 
feudalism of merchants that shut the people out 
of the privileges of the markets and grew rich 
upon the tribute which they levied without hav- 
ing recourse to the laws. It was against the in- 
tolerable oppression of this aristocracy of mer- 
chants that the craft gilds were formed, organ- 
izations of men whose hands produced those 
articles from the sale of which the merchant 
class became rich. And under the assault of 
these artisan bodies the power of the merchant 
class as a rival for leadership in the commer- 
cial world was ended forever. Henceforth the 
position of middleman, the buyer and seller, was 
to be subordinate to that of the producer. But 
it would be a serious mistake to confound this 
artisan producer of the gild system with the 
working-classes of to-day. For in this old sys- 
tem of production it was the master workman, 
the employer, who was supreme and who has 
since expanded into the powerful figure of capi- 
talist-manufacturer, just as the old Saxon and 
German chiefs through the centuries have 
evolved into king and kaiser. The mass of 
workers, the journeymen and apprentices, had 
no voice whatever in determining the conditions 

68 



THE DEMOCRATIC RUSSIANS 

of their labor, and every effort wliicli they made 
in this direction was for centuries successfully 
thwarted by the controlling industrial aristoc- 
racy, at first by the sheer power of their organi- 
zations and later by the aid of the state, which 
they had finally come to control. 

There is a tragical significance in the term 
*' journeyman" thus early applied to the Eng- 
lish workman, a man who had then, and was to 
have through the centuries, no permanent home, 
but was to wander from place to place in search 
of work, and for a long time, as we know, even 
this wandering was forbidden him. To what 
vast numbers has this journeyman increased, 
this free Anglo-Saxon, stripped through the 
ages of his land and finally of his very tools of 
industry! Along with the other institutions 
which this world-conqueror has built, is the in- 
stitution of pauperism. 

Re-reading the history of England in the new 
light which is spreading over the world, it is 
incomprehensible that we should ever have been 
beguiled into conceiving of the Anglo-Saxon as 
the pioneer of democracy. That he is an in- 
dividualist, and that his dogged insistence upon 
the rights of the individual in matters of state 
has been of incalculable service, there can be no 

69 



THE WORLD STORM AND BEYOND 

doubt; but times have shown only too clearly 
that individualism may be as great a foe to de- 
mocracy as the most unrestricted autocracy. 

Consider now the Russian workman. Despite 
the early start which the other nations had over 
Russia in industrial development, there has 
quietly grown up in the latter an institution 
which shows her in reality much further ad- 
vanced than the former in the conception, as 
well as in the establishment, of industrial de- 
mocracy. This institution, which is known as 
the artel, had its origin, according to a report 
recently made to the British Government, 
among the Cossacks of the Dnieper before the 
gild system appeared in England or in Germany. 
Though still in the hunter stage, these Cos- 
sacks perceived a truth which the leading na- 
tions of Europe and America are only now be- 
ginning to perceive, namely, that it is better to 
cooperate than to compete. And so, instead of 
hunting individually, they hunted in groups and 
divided the game. It may be said that savages 
everywhere have done the same. If so, it is to 
the glory of the Russian people that they have 
realized that in certain respects the savage is 
superior to the civilized man. Despite the al- 
lurements of ** civilization," they have continued 

70 



THE DEMOCRATIC RUSSIANS 

this barbarous practice of cooperating, and it 
is to-day to be found in sucb widely separated 
parts of the country, both in the rural districts 
and in the cities, as to prove beyond controversy 
that the Russian is instinctively democratic; in 
other words, that he naturally foregoes those 
pleasures of self-assertion which would work 
to the injury of the people as a whole. And 
therefore we find him grouped in these artels, 
pure democracies, the heads of which are elected 
by the members, performing all sorts of work, 
from the simplest field labor to the building of 
houses and the carrying of the mails. In the 
craft gilds of the Teutonic peoples it was the 
master workman who took the contract or 
financed the home manufacture, and who ex- 
ploited to his heart's content those whom he 
hired, whereas in the artel it is the group that 
is the master; it is the group that, like a joint- 
stock company, pools its labor, and sometimes 
its capital, and shares the profits. While indi- 
vidualism in industry exists in Russia, as it 
does in every other commercial nation, the artel 
exists only in Russia, and may therefore be 
taken as an index of what the Russian people 
will do when their great strength, which is now 
wasting itself upon the borders, is called back 

71 



THE WOELD STORM AND BEYOND 

to begin the work of internal development. For 
though in some cases this institution has been 
sapped and has gone down before the more ag- 
gressive individualistic system of the Teutonic 
peoples, as the national consciousness deepens, 
and Eussia discovers the true value of her own 
creations as other peoples have discovered 
theirs, the artel will replace the Cossack in the 
attention of the world. 

Already signs are at hand that the hour of 
its conquest has begun. In various parts of the 
empire these artels are enlarging the sphere of 
their activities and are entering the broader 
field of manufacture. Eural workshops, called 
svietelhas, owned and operated by these artels, 
are being established to take over the house- 
hold industries. And in autocratic Eussia the 
establishment of these industrial democracies is 
being encouraged by the authorities. Compare 
this long stride which the Eussians have made 
toward a wide democracy with what has been 
done in America by the labor-unions. These 
latter have not advanced even in thought beyond 
the old aristocratic wage system. Their aim 
has been toward shortening the hours and rais- 
ing the wage of labor, not at all toward own- 
ership and freedom. Does this prove nothing 

72 



THE DEMOCEATIC EUSSIANS 

as to the relative democracy of the two coun- 
tries? 

It has been maintained, however, that these 
democratic tendencies of the Eussian people are 
simply primitive impulses surviving from their 
barbaric past, and that these will be outgrown 
and left behind, as they invariably are as a peo- 
ple becomes more enlightened. The answer to 
this lies deep in the character of the Eussian 
people. It is true that the influence of sur- 
rounding nations has altered Eussian institu- 
tions and will probably continue to alter them, 
but we must not overlook the fact that within 
these nations themselves a profound change is 
taking place — a change which, when in full force 
it reaches Eussia, will tend toward the preserva- 
tion rather than the destruction of these crude 
democracies. Socialism, which is democracy at 
work in the bread-getting business of life, will 
see to it that these precious seeds are not de- 
stroyed. Just what modifications this influence 
will bring about cannot be foretold. The de- 
ciding factor, as has been said, will be the char- 
acter of the Eussian people. 

But how does the Eussian character fit in with 
the aspirations of democracy? How shall we 
reconcile Eussia the known with Eussia the un- 

73 



THE WORLD STORM AND BEYOND 

known, the Russia of the Siberian penal system, 
of pogroms and world-wide conquests, with the 
Russia of the mir, of the artel and the svietelJcaf 
It would be futile to attempt to reconcile them, 
for no reconciliation is possible. We are here 
confronted by a contradiction similar to that 
which we face in nature when we see on the one 
hand the healing of a bird's wing and on the 
other the tidal wave and the earthquake. In 
no other nation perhaps are these two qualities, 
kindness and cruelty, brotherhood and tyranny, 
so accentuated as they are in this twilight land 
where day and night mingle. Usually it is 
either the one or the other that stands out as 
the chief characteristic, but in Russia it is both. 
Her temperament is a compound of opposites; 
her history is a contradiction. On every page 
are crimes against humanity that make the 
heart sink and the blood run cold; in every 
chapter are monsters compared with whom the 
later Caesars are novices. On the other hand, 
open any book in Russia, whether written by 
friend or foe, and note the epithets employed 
to describe the Russian people. Dreamy, im- 
aginative, inoffensive, simple, affectionate, 
childlike — all these are almost invariably the 
words one meets. Nowhere is there a hint of 

74 



THE DEMOCRATIC RUSSIANS 

those qualities which are thrown up as dark 
shadows on the canvas of her horizon. It is 
the unanimous verdict among even casual ob- 
servers that the Russian people **have none of 
those stem qualities of which conquerors are 
made.'* And yet almost from her earliest his- 
tory she has gone forth sword in hand. This is 
the dualism which confronts us. While with 
one hand she is conquering the world, with the 
other she is writing appeals for the establish- 
ment of a Hague court. In the same generation 
she produces a Plehve and a Tolstoy, both in a 
way true to the national type. 

No one living in countries inhabited by Ger- 
manic or Latin peoples can possibly understand 
the Russian nation, even that part of it which 
lies west of the ;Urals, if he conceives of it as 
an entity similar to that of his own nation. 
Russia is made up of two parts that have never 
fused and that never can fuse, for the first part 
is to the second as a school of sharks is to a 
colony of corals. The real Russian people lie 
almost unseen imder a foreign overlay which 
has somehow got itself recognized among the 
nations as Russia, and which began to be de- 
posited more than a thousand years ago when 
Ruric the Norseman, with his followers, came 

75 



THE WOELD STOEM AND BEYOND 

in and establislied themselves as rulers of the 
land. 

Then for more than two centuries the land 
was under the heel of the Tartars, another con- 
quering people who left behind them a deep de- 
posit of violence and crime. And almost im- 
mediately after the expulsion of the Tartars 
there began a third period of foreign domina- 
tion, that peaceful Germanic invasion which 
from the days of Peter the Great has persist- 
ently warred against the ideals of this peace- 
ful people, which became the source of the re- 
pressive bureaucratic system and which, as an 
active influence in Eussian politics, is respon- 
sible for many of those crimes that the world 
has ignorantly laid at the door of the Slavic 
people. It is not generally known that the pres- 
ent house of Eomanoff, which has held the scep- 
ter for three hundred years, is half German. 
We in America who know something of the 
part played by George III of the House of Han- 
over-Brunswick in the oppression of the Col- 
onies and how, in opposition to the idealists of 
England, he fought this conflict to the bitter 
end, will understand something of what two 
hundred years of Germanization has meant to 
the Eussian people. 

76 



THE DEMOCRATIC RUSSIANS 

For a long period when the great mass of the 
peasantry were serfs upon the estates of the 
Russian nobility, the task-masters upon these 
estates were as a rule Germans who had been 
imported to wring a larger return from the la- 
bor of this unfortunate people. And the record 
which they left in the land accounts in a very 
large measure for the enmity between the Slav 
and the German which is finding vent in the 
present war. And in the higher offices of the 
ministry, too, it has been the hand of the Ger- 
man, especially the German of the Russian Bal- 
tic provinces, that has too often set the Russian 
Government in opposition to the Russian peo- 
ple. Count Witte, for example, the famous 
financial minister, who has probably had a 
greater influence in shaping the policy of the 
Russian Government than any other man dur- 
ing the reign of Nicholas II, is one of these. 
According to a German writer, no man has laid 
a greater burden upon the Russian people in 
order to bolster up the false system of Russian 
expansion. And, if we except Pobiedonostsef, 
the fanatical Procurator of the Holy Synod, 
Count "Witte has been the ablest champion of the 
reactionary movement. He it was who fought 
the establishment of the Provincial Assemblies 

77 



THE WOELD STOEM AND BEYOND 

and who, in a manifesto to the Czar, expressed 
his conviction that there was no way of ruling 
the peasant except by the knout. And Plehve, 
the notorious Minister of the Interior, was an- 
other Baltic German. I do not mention these 
facts as a reflection upon the Grerman people, for 
they too have suffered at the hands of these 
same oppressors in the Fatherland, but simply 
to show that neither upon her borders nor 
within her interior can all the inhumanity of 
Eussia be fairly charged to the Eussian peo- 
ple. In speaking of the Eussian character as 
it shines through the enforced service of the 
Eussian soldier, von der Briiggen, the eminent 
historian, who certainly cannot be charged with 
prejudice in their favor, makes it all too plain 
that even in the brutal business of conquest the 
Eussian does not forget, in his contact with for- 
eign peoples, that kindly brotherhood which 
marks him in his association with his kindred. 
*' Wherever the Eussian finds a native popula- 
tion in a low state of civilization, he knows how 
to settle down with it without driving it out or 
crushing it; he is hailed by the natives as the 
bringer of order, as a civilizing power, and does 
not awaken the embittered feeling of dependence 
50 long as the Government does not conjure up 

78 



THE DEMOCRATIC RUSSIANS 

national or religious strife/' The italics are 
mine. 

That this whole vicious system of Russian 
outrage is a thing entirely separate from the 
Slavic people and absolutely contrary to their 
nature becomes even clearer when we remem- 
ber that of all the idealists and friends of free- 
dom who have assailed this system not one of 
them compares in passionate utterance to Rus- 
sians own prophet, Tolstoy. Here is the living 
voice of the Russian people, as Lincoln is the 
living voice of the American people. Tolstoy 
is the glorified Russian peasant uttering his 
heart to the world from the cross of the ages. 
From this man alone, in modem times, has gone 
out the living conviction that peace and brother- 
hood are realities destined sooner or later to 
conquer the world. From this heart of the 
Russian people we see, like a saving spirit in 
the midst of blood and death, spreading out 
over the world, that wide circle of democracy 
beyond which you cannot go. 



79 



LAND AND WAR 



IV 

LAND AND WAR 

AS far up toward its source as we can fol- 
low the stream of civilizajtion, we find the 
land problem already pared to the quick. In 
the valley of the Nile, among the cities of 
Greece, in Eome, both republican and imperial, 
and on down through the welter of the Dark 
Ages, even to the present day, this question of 
food sources for the individual and the nation 
is the one question that has successfully defied 
permanent solution. Slavery, that trailed man 
for ages, we have left behind us. Eeligious 
wars will probably never again redden the 
planet. The power of the rulers is gradually 
being circumscribed by constitutions so that in 
general froni political oppression the individual 
is measurably secure. For all these we have 
either found or are in the way of finding so- 
lutions. But in the matter of the land prob- 
lem, lying as it does at the very foundation of 
life, we are still in the maze, and our progress 
toward a solution is annoyingly slow. 

83 



THE WOELD STORM AND BEYOND 

If we consider the wars of the world, we shall 
find them falling into one of two classes j wars 
for personal ambition and wars of human need. 
And of both classes by far the larger per cent, 
has been over land : conquerors extending their 
dominions, or a people expropriated for one 
reason or another seeking homes in some other 
region or, within their own state, rising against 
the upper classes to recover their ancestral pos- 
sessions. Upon the first of these we need not 
particularly dwell, for history is full of them, 
and every schoolboy has at his tongue's end the 
names of their leaders. And even where no 
conspicuous leader emerged, these wars of con- 
quest are in a class by themselves and easily 
distinguished from the others. By the unani- 
mous opinion of mankind, this class of wars 
has been branded as infamous. But for those 
conflicts which have arisen from a people's need 
of land, there has always been a universal sym- 
pathy and in many cases an outspoken admira- 
tion. 

It is a remarkable fact and yet one which not 
infrequently confronts us in history, that the 
land holdings of a people individually are gen- 
erally in inverse ratio to the land holdings of 
their state ; or in other words, that as the state 

84 



LAND AND WAR 

begins to win the world the people of that state 
begin to lose their own farms. This it would 
seem is the Nemesis that follows the armies of 
conquerors, that a people which aids and abets 
its state in a lawless assault upon the territory 
of a foreign people will themselves be obliged 
eventually to drain the same bitter cup in their 
own individual lives. He who helps steal a 
province shall lose his own farm. How comes it 
we have never perceived the truth of this, when 
it is written out in capitals on the pages of his- 
tory? Unquestionably because we read history 
for cultural, never for ethical, purposes. Or 
shall we say that those who can afford the lei- 
sure for reading history are never the ones who 
bear the burden of conquest but are rather di- 
rectly or indirectly the beneficiaries of the rob- 
bery? Whatever the reason may be, the fact 
remains that so far as our handling of the land 
problem is concerned, it is as though there were 
no such things as the lessons of history. We 
go round and round on the same old wheel that 
is worn smooth by the feet of generations dead 
and gone. In other things we progress, be- 
cause we build upon the experience of the past. 
In mechanics, in agriculture, in sanitation, iii 
almost everything that one can mention, we 

85 



THE WORLD STORM AND BEYOND 

carry along witli us the wisdom of the past. 
But in this most vital of all questions, the land 
problem, our yesterdays are as nothing. We 
go off hither and thither after the thousand and 
one interests of life and again and again come 
back utterly naked to this oldest of all prob- 
lems. Is this an extravagant statement? 

Let us open the great book of history and, 
choosing some nation of the long ago, tear out 
those pages which deal with the relation of its 
people to their land, and lay them side by side 
with similar pages just written. And in order 
that the comparison may be a fair one and throw 
light upon as many phases as possible of this 
problem, let us take in each case a nation with 
wide land holdings, empires if we can find them, 
whose history has been so thoroughly explored 
as to leave no doubt that it is facts we are deal- 
ing with. If among the nations we can find two 
of this sort, one ancient and one modern, and es- 
pecially if they are alike in this also, that in 
both the land problem became acute, we should 
be able to make a comparison which would help 
us in determining how much progress, if any, 
we have made in this respect, and also clear up 
certain matters of fundamental importance in- 
volved in the present war. 

86 



LAND AND WAR 

It is evident that if we are to meet all the 
above requirements we shall be obliged to take 
from the past Eome and from the present 
Britain. Here we have two empires with ter- 
ritories reaching in each case to the limits of 
the known world, whose records are clear, and 
in both of which the land problem early became 
and for centuries remained a most irritating 
one. 

It was the policy of Eome in her acquisition 
of foreign territory to take from a conquered 
people a portion, usually a third, of their land, 
and this thereafter was considered the peculiar 
property of the Roman state. Upon this public 
land, with the exception of those parts of it 
that were set aside for the veterans of the Ro- 
man army, Roman citizens were allowed to set- 
tle on condition that a portion of the product 
of the land should be turned over to the state. 
The part still unsettled became "commons," 
upon which Romans of all classes could turn 
their stock. Eventually these open tracts were 
claimed by the wealthy classes who, despite op- 
position, succeeded in forcing from the state 
a recognition of their claim. Owing to this 
stealthy confiscation of the public lands, large 
numbers of the people were deprived of their 

87 



THE WOELD STORM AND BEYOND 

livelihood, and, in tlie hope of improving their 
condition, sought refuge in the capital. This 
was the beginning of that turbulent population 
for whose poverty and loss of independence, ever 
rising into a menace, the upper classes of Eome 
felt compelled to make a quieting restitution in 
tremendous charities of grain, the distribution 
of which only aggravated the evil by attracting 
to Eome the outcasts of the world. Later, a 
similar encroachment was begun by the same 
wealthy class upon that other portion of the 
conquered land which had been given to the 
poorer Eomans. More money could be made 
and with less danger of an uprising of tenants 
by converting farms into pasture for sheep and 
cattle. In this way finally, either by open rob- 
bery or by forced sale, the Eoman people were 
dispossessed of their small holdings and turned 
adrift to wander and to take at last the wide 
road to Eome. 

Meanwhile, the Eoman armies with recruits 
eternally drawn from this vagrant population 
were conquering the world. By a people that 
were steadily losing their acres, province after 
province was being added to the already vast 
possessions of the state. By a species of jug- 
glery which has been practised over and over 

88 



LAND AND WAR 

since the beginning of the world, sons of fathers 
who had lost their little farms were tricked into 
taking up the sword to win kingdoms for the 
robbers. And every attempt to expose this 
monstrous crime against the freedom and life 
of a great people was ruthlessly smothered. 
We shall probably never know how many ar- 
dent champions of a better order of things lost 
their lives in this unequal contest. Between 
Spurius Cassius, the ''first social reformer of 
Rome" and also the first martyr to this cause 
of simple justice, and Gains Gracchus, the first 
to make any headway and whose blood also 
stained the streets of Eome, lie more than three 
hundred and fifty years of almost futile strug- 
gle. 

If England had never heard of Rome, if her 
statesmen had never read of the transforma- 
tion of that sturdy, independent, agricultural 
people into an idle, broken-spirited city mob, 
fed and amused by the Caesars, we should not 
be surprised at what has happened in the Island 
Kingdom. I do not know that attention has 
ever been called to the similarity in social de- 
velopment between England and Rome, We 
have probably been so disarmed by the marked 
difference between them in their political evolu- 

89 



THE WOELD STOEM AND BEYOND 

tion, the one entering her civilized period as a 
republic and thence converging toward mon- 
archy, the other moving in the opposite direc- 
tion, that we have failed to note the parallel 
currents of their social development. But no 
one can read the history of the rise of the land- 
lords in England and not perceive at once the 
appalling resemblance between the republic of 
yesterday and monarchy of to-day. 

Turn back to the period of the early Tudors 
and you will find pages which might have been 
torn bodily from the history of early Eome. 
Here under English names the plebeians and 
patricians are again at war. The Anglo-Saxon 
is going round the old wheel of the Latin. And 
the cause of the struggle is identical with that 
which tore Eome. It has become more profita- 
ble to raise sheep than to turn over the sod, 
and steadily before the advance of sheep the 
people disappear. It is really a question, as 
we come down through the ages, whether men 
have preyed more upon the animal kingdom 
or the animal kingdom more upon man. If man 
has driven the wild animal farther and farther 
into the depths of the wilderness, the domesti- 
cated animal, in Britain certainly, has driven 
man farther and farther from the health of 

90 



LAND AND WAR 

the open fields into the slums of the cities. Not 
only are the great tracts of the lords of the 
manor converted into pastures, but the commons 
are enclosed. And after the commons, the 
small farms. The little hedge of right ceases 
any longer to protect the small acres. By this 
relentless broom of the landlord even the cot- 
tages are swept away. In the place of villages 
are stretches of the returned grass, with here 
and there a lonely spire and thatched roofs fallen 
into ruin. That devastation which we think of 
as following only in the wake of armies was 
here diffused through centuries. The yeomen 
of England, whose fathers had fallen in many a 
battle for the glory of England, had entered 
upon the same path toward city pauperism as 
that which seventeen hundred years before the 
Romans had taken to misery and oblivion. In 
order that flocks might have pasture, and let 
us add, that foxes and pheasants might thrive, 
a diversion for royal hunters from the boredom 
of idleness, thousands of people were set adrift. 
Men, women, and children were turned out that 
primal nature might again have sway. It had 
become more important in the eyes of England 
to raise an abundance of wool than to preserve 
a sturdy race of men. 

91 



THE WOELD STOEM AND BEYOND 

It is to the credit of the English people that, 
like the Eomans before them, they resisted these 
attempts to dispossess them, at first by laws 
which proved of no avail and later by that last 
resort of free men, their good right arm; but 
unfortunately, as I have pointed out elsewhere, 
with none of that unconquerable spirit that 
through the centuries has won for them a far 
larger measure of political freedom. As far 
back as the early Tudors, so inhuman were the 
outrages of the landlords that in several parts 
of England there were uprisings which before 
they were finally put down cost the lives of thou- 
sands. In Somerset, the Protector, who sympa- 
thized with the people and for a time tried to 
aid them and who because of this opposition to 
the patricians of England was later tried for 
treason and executed, we have a worthy suc- 
cessor of Spurius Cassius, who for advocating 
the same cause lost his life in early Eome. 

And from the days of Somerset down all the 
intervening years this expropriation has gone 
steadily on, often by leaps and bounds. Indeed, 
if it had been a matter of deliberate policy, if 
the small landowners had been an alien race and 
England had determined from the first to weed 

92 



LAND AND WAR 

tliem out, she could not have gone about it more 
effectively than she has done. It is open to 
serious question if the people of England would 
not to-day be better off if the island had been 
conquered by Napoleon. For, compared to the 
French people who entered the race for liberty 
far behind the people of England, it must be 
confessed that the French are infinitely better 
off. Indeed, there is not a people in Europe 
whose livelihood is so precarious as the Saxon 
of England. Possessed of one-fifth of the hab- 
itable globe, they are either tenants upon the 
confiscated freeholds of their ancestors or in 
crowded cities dependent for their daily bread 
upon the slender thread of foreign trade. Here 
are the records of what the Roman policy of the 
Island Kingdom had accomplished at the be- 
ginning of the latter half of the Victorian era, 
records which without the least exaggeration we 
may call the records of a crime. But because 
it was accomplished by England instead of Rus- 
sia, because it has blighted the lives of a whole 
people instead of a few rubber gatherers in the 
Belgian Congo, we have heard little of it. I 
quote from a member of the English Parliament 
who in turn quotes from government statis- 
tics. 

93 



THE WOELD STORM AND BEYOND 

''The Return (1872) shows that 852,000 land- 
owners only possess on an average a little more 
than one-fifth of an acre, while the Duke of Suth- 
erland possessed seven times as much as their 
entire holdings. Dividing the Return into two 
great classes, 1,105,000 landlords hold about 
5,000,000 acres, while 67,978 landlords hold 67,- 
000,000 acres. From the same Return we 
gather that twenty-eight dukes hold estates to 
the amount of nearly 4,000,000 acres, thirty- 
three marquises 1,500,000 acres, one hundred 
and ninety-four earls 5,862,000 acres, and two 
hundred and seventy viscounts and barons 
3,785,000 acres. The Return shows that 2,250 
persons owned in that day nearly half the en- 
closed land of England and Wales. Nine-tenths 
of Scotland was owned by 1,700, and two-thirds 
of Ireland by 1,942 persons." 

Yet in face of these facts, facts written, if 
ever facts were written, in a people's blood, the 
devourer had continued his advance unchecked. 
"Within thirty years immediately following the 
above-shown condition, familiar all the while 
to the law makers of England, so great was the 
decline in agriculture during this period, accord- 
ing to a recent writer in the Fortnightly Review, 
that "the crops produced by our farmers have 

94 



LAND AND WAR 

so seriously decreased that of the capital in- 
vested in British agriculture no less than £1,000,- 
000,000 has been lost. ' ' More than $165,000,000 
of capital withdrawn every year from farming, 
while every year because of intolerable condi- 
tions more than 200,000 people leave England to 
seek homes elsewhere ! In not one nation of con- 
tinental Europe does the proportion of the * * oc- 
cupied population" engaged in agriculture 
fall below 30 per cent., whereas in Great 
Britain the per cent, is 9.2. Think of half of 
Great Britain, an island of unsurpassed fer- 
tility and climate, lying in grass while fifty 
per cent, of the children of the cities and larger 
towns in England are underfed. In a speech 
delivered not long ago, Winston Churchill 
summed it all up in one terrible phrase. * ' The 
fortunate people of Britain are more happy than 
any other equally numerous class have been 
in the history of the world. I believe the left- 
out millions are more miserable. Our van- 
guard enjoys the delights of the ages. Our rear 
guard straggles out into conditions that are 
crueler than barbarism." The statement is a 
conservative one. Compared to actual living 
conditions in France under the Bourbons from 
which that mighty people rose in successful re- 

95 



THE WOELD STORM AND BEYOND 

volt, conditions in England under George Y 
are incontestably worse. And when we remem- 
ber what, during the last two hundred years, 
England's far-flung battle line has been doing, 
how thousands upon thousands of Englishmen 
have bought colonies for Britain at the price of 
their own homes, the analogy of the fate of the 
Saxon to the fate of the Eoman becomes tragi- 
cally clear. In England, as in Eome, the army 
of sheep has been more terrible than an army 
with banners. Little wonder that the ravages 
of drunkenness in the Island Kingdom are 
''more terrible than war." There comes a time 
in the history of nations as of individuals 
when the supreme blessing is the ability to for- 
get. 

If England, traveling these long centuries the 
road of Eome, has thus far escaped the utter 
decay which overtook her imperial sister, her 
good fortune is due not to the fact that the greed 
of her landlords has been less or that the pro- 
tection given by the government to the people 
has been more than in ancient Eome, but solely 
to her superior commercial development. That 
wool for which she early sacrificed her people 
became the foundation of a foreign trade that 
has come as a saving hand between the English 

96 



LAND AND WAR 

people and that dire fate which crept upon their 
brothers in the South. If England has not 
felt obliged to distribute her charities quite so 
ostentatiously but has resorted to the more 
modern palliatives of old-age pensions, sick ben- 
efits and the like ; if she has not been driven to 
supplying circuses to divert the bitter broodings 
of a menacing population, it is certainly not due 
to her having solved any better than Eome this 
eternal problem of land. Looms, it is true, 
afford a more solid foundation for a people's 
well-being than do circuses, but always there is 
danger that these looms may stop. This is the 
haunting thought, the pursuing ghost that 
everywhere gives such a somber aspect to the 
separation of a people from their land. Once 
let England's foreign trade be menaced, as it 
has already been menaced, and the Island King- 
dom faces the dilemma, Circuses or Land. 

In view of these facts, it is not particularly 
surprising that England has at last awakened to 
the realization that during all these centuries 
of accumulating disaster there was such a thing 
as history to guide her, and that now with the 
lions of the arena on the one hand and her great 
landlords on the other she turns weakly toward 
those vast enclosed tracts, barren of population, 

97 



THE WOELD STORM AND BEYOND 

that were once tlie homes of a thrifty and con- 
tented people. 

It is fortunate for England that she has pro- 
duced at this crucial period a man of the vision 
and courage of Lloyd-George. If it is not too 
late, if this long dependence has not already 
sapped the manhood of the people, something 
may yet he done. But when we remember that 
the disease has been the cause of wide and un- 
relieved distress for more than two hundred 
years, and when we see that vast masses of this 
unfortunate people have already forgotten that 
the land is really theirs and are either uncon- 
cerned or ready to defend the title of the pres- 
ent owners, the long hard task confronting Eng- 
land becomes clear. 

And right here I would call attention — es- 
pecially the attention of England — to an even 
greater dilemma than that which she faces at 
home, one indeed of which the condition we have 
just been describing is one horn and of which 
the other horn has seriously to do with the pres- 
ent war. 

While England has been developing exten- 
sively, Germany has been developing inten- 
sively; while England has been winning prov- 
inces, Germany has been fertilizing her acres; 

98 



LAND AND WAR 

while England's drum-beat has been going 
round the world and her traders have been fol- 
lowing in its wake, the German hive has been 
humming with the labor of an increasing and 
well-cared-for population. It is as though im- 
perial Rome had divided and one-half of her, 
her lust of conquest, had found refuge in Eng- 
land, and the other half, her aptitude for arms 
and organization, had established itself in Ger- 
many. Though we have not grasped their full 
meaning, though we have failed even to attend 
them, side by side for the instruction of the 
world two tremendous social experiments have 
been going on. And now having reached their 
culmination, these two systems, the extensive 
and the intensive, provinces and acres, world 
dominion and individual efficiency, confront one 
another across the Straits of Dover. 

No one can read the history of these two 
countries and not be filled with amazement that 
two peoples of the same stock should have pur- 
sued paths so divergent. From the very begin- 
ning it would seem that England was destined 
to play the role of the landlord both at home and 
abroad. Virtually all her problems, both do- 
mestic and foreign, have been such as, on a 
small scale, her peers have had to meet in the 

99 



THE WOELD STORM ANB BEYOND 

management of their estates, to draw from their 
tenants for the upkeep of the castle the largest 
possible revenue consistent with similar con- 
siderations for the future. Germany, on the 
other hand, though she too has had her prob- 
lems, has never allowed herself to be haunted 
by the specter of a population dispossessed by 
landlords. Never in Germany has the primal 
grass encroached upon the cultivated field, never 
have men fled before sheep. If her people 
have crowded into cities, it has at least not been 
to escape the clutch of the landlord. If they 
have gone into factories, it has been of their own 
free will and with a realization doubtless that 
in this field lay greater opportunities for the 
exercise of their peculiar genius for organiza- 
tion. 

Two things have diverted attention from the 
land question in Germany — ^her stupendous mili- 
tary system and the amazing expansion of her 
foreign trade. But it is evident that we can- 
not fairly judge a state unless we know some- 
thing of the relation of its people to their land. 
For after all, free institutions depend for per- 
manency upon this relation. And where the 
relation is one of injustice it is to no purpose 
that a glittering superstructure is erected. 

100 



LAND AND WAR 

There is no power, either of parliaments or of 
armies, that can save such a nation from even- 
tual decay or from an ultimate revolution that 
will steadily gather strength and motion or sub- 
side and intermittently break out, until this 
foundation is put in order. It is a pity that a 
knowledge of what Germany has done in the 
matter of land ownership and cultivation has 
not been more generally spread abroad. Her 
record in this respect, like that which she has 
made in city management, is something for 
which humanity would show much more sym- 
pathy and admiration than it has shown for her 
military or even for her cultural development. 
And, moreover, the world is in need of every 
stray gleam of light upon this subject. 

At the very outset of our investigation we are 
met by a condition which, compared to the wide 
misery beyond the North Sea, goes far toward 
explaining the more evenly distributed pros- 
perity of the German people and which, like a 
thick layer of granite, upholds the colossal 
structure of German efficiency that both in peace 
and in war has been the astonishment of the 
world. 

In England less than thirteen per cent, of the 
land is cultivated by its owners and the other 

101 



THE WOELD STOEM AND BEYOND 

eighty-seven per cent, by tenants, whereas in 
Germany just the reverse is true; the thirteen 
per cent, are tenants and the eighty-seven per 
cent, are owners. Again, when we compare the 
agricultural output of the two countries the dif- 
ference is even more astounding. With a cul- 
tivated area approximately one-third larger 
than that of the United Kingdom, the product 
of the German farms is four times as great as 
those of the United Kingdom. And even these 
facts, that should have rung like a warning bell 
over England and turned her face not in rivalry 
toward her thrifty neighbor but toward her own 
depopulated acres — even these facts do not tell 
the full story of the relative rise and fall of 
these two great peoples. During the thirty 
years ending 1911 the grass lands of England in- 
creased by 3,000,000 acres and the sheep by 
2,000,000, whereas in Germany during the same 
period the grass lands fell off by 7,000,000 acres, 
and the sheep by 14,000,000 ! While to keep up 
her foreign trade, the nurse of her exhausted 
cities, England has felt compelled to sacrifice 
her people to sheep, Germany has sacrificed her 
sheep for the good of her people and has found 
other ways of securing a foreign trade that is 
fast overtaking that of England. 

102 



LAND AND WAE 

But within the past few years a new age has 
dawned for Germany, as sooner or later it must 
dawn for every nation. Eventually, after 
prodigal wandering, humanity must again face 
the problem of the soil. And no matter how 
economically the ancestral territory may have 
been used, to an expanding race sooner or later 
the ancient question will return. So far as 
Germany is concerned, that day has already ar- 
rived, "With an area one-fifth less than Texas 
and with a population over two-thirds that of 
the whole United States, Germany finds herself 
facing identically the same problem that Eng- 
land is facing, the problem of land. But for 
Germany, unfortunately, it has proved a gor- 
dian knot, the untying of which has brought her 
into conflict with her neighbors, whereas for 
England the problem is altogether a domestic 
one. Let us look into this a little more closely, 
for here it is we shall find that terrible dilemma 
between the horns of which at last, after cen- 
turies of evasion, England is caught. 

By what blunder of the Fates has it come 
about that the German people should wake up 
to the fact that they need land just when the 
English people were waking up to a similar 
need? "Where was England's perpetual good 

103 



THE WOELD STOEM AND BEYOND 

fortune that this should have been allowed? 
Why could not the one or the other have been 
postponed? For consider the irony of the 
situation, the difficulty in which England now 
finds herself. 

There is not one argument which the Liberal 
Party has used against the landlords of Eng- 
land — and they are many and weighty — that 
Germany cannot use with equal justice against 
England herself. For who that is acquainted 
with the Island Kingdom and with the empire 
over which her scepter is potent does not know 
that England sustains the same relation to the 
crowded peoples of the world as do her own 
landlords to the crowded peoples of England. 
Loosen for a moment the imagination and let 
it lift up and flatten out the surface of the globe. 
Now magically diminish it and lay it upon the Is- 
land Kingdom, distributing its population ac- 
cording to the cities. Then look at it from above. 
London is China, Glasgow is India, Liverpool 
is Germany, etc. And the wide grass lands 
of the island are Canada, Australia, and South 
Africa. If the Liberal Party, which at present 
is the government of England, is right in its de- 
mand that the wide acres of the landlords in 
England be returned to the people, by what logic 

104 



LAND AND WAR 

has this same party arrived at the conclusion 
that the crowded peoples of the world have no 
claim upon the unoccupied provinces of Great 
Britain? Is it because the title which England 
holds to her provinces is sounder than that held 
by the English landlords to their estates'? It 
needs but the slightest acquaintance with the 
manner in which these provinces were acquired 
to correct this impression. How few has she 
ever paid for, how many has she, directly or 
indirectly, acquired by the sword ! 

By the law of the talent, he that uses one 
well shall receive two. Has the Island King- 
dom used her seventy million ancestral acres 
better than Germany her one hundred and 
thirty-five million that the former is entitled to 
more than ten times the amount of the earth's 
surface enjoyed by the latter? Why, for in- 
stance, should the German, if he wishes to leave 
his native land and take up his home in foreign 
parts, be obliged to settle in a limited area of 
Africa or in some of the other infinitesimal Ger- 
man possessions, uncongenial they may be, and 
offering little opportunity for the development 
of his talent, while the Englishman, setting forth 
on a similar mission, has every continent and 
every climate to choose from? 

105 



THE WOELD STORM AND BEYOND 

It may be said that the British colonies are 
open to the German immigrant as they are open 
to the immigrants of other nations, even to those 
from England herself. While this is true, while 
there are no barriers in the way of a German's 
making his home in any of the innumerable Brit- 
ish possessions, there is a condition to such set- 
tlement which, to a proud people, is the greatest 
barrier in the world. Fortunately or unfor- 
tunately, there is still such a thing as patriot- 
ism. To say to the German, forced out of his 
own country by its growing population, that 
there is one-fifth of the globe with vast unsettled 
tracts upon no acre of which he can make his 
home and take part in the government of the 
country without becoming a British subject, is 
essentially a ** no-permit." Undoubtedly there 
are regions, and wide regions, that in the nature 
of things should be under one sovereignty, but 
it is evident that there should be some limit to 
this. The claim must rest upon something more 
solid than mere conquest — ^upon racial or geo- 
graphical unity. To allow a nation to seize and 
hold fast by the sword far-scattered possessions 
inhabited by heterogeneous peoples and to im- 
pose its citizenship upon every incomer who de- 
sires to live the full life of a free man, to ex- 

106 



LAND AND WAE 

press himself in the government as well as in 
the business of the country, is a temptation to 
conquest and a hate-breeder which humanity 
cannot afford to perpetuate. 

Would England herself in this matter of land 
be willing to square her domestic policy with her 
foreign policy ? Would she be willing to accept, 
for instance, as a compromise of the fight she 
is waging to recover from the peers her people's 
acres, the condition which she herself imposes 
upon those who seek homes in her foreign pos- 
sessions, viz.: that the people who settle upon 
these royal estates shall become ipso facto ten- 
ants upon the land, free to plow and sow and 
market their products, yes ; but in the matter of 
their civic life no longer subjects of England, 
owing allegiance to the government of England, 
but belonging henceforth solely to these peers'? 
Even those nations whose sympathy is with the 
Allies in the present conflict are awake to the 
moral dilemma in which England is involved 
and are wondering how when the present war 
is over she will extricate herself. 

For landlordism no less than militarism is 
one of the problems that must somehow be 
solved by this war, if the peace which the world 
is hoping will come is to be a permanent peace. 

107 



THE WORLD STORM AND BEYOND 

For the terrible sacrifices which Europe is mak- 
ing to end war would be to no purpose were its 
aim simply to abolish preparations for war and 
not also causes of war. So long as there is 
one nation that, without restraint and as the 
mood seizes it, is allowed to confiscate the lands 
of weak peoples in every part of the earth and 
to compel every person who settles within this 
conquered territory and who wishes to partici- 
pate in the government of his new home to sever 
his connection with his own country and become 
a subject of the conquering nation, it is as plain 
as day that the present war will be followed by 
another and still another, until landlordism too 
has disappeared. If the matter is not settled 
now and settled rightly, it will be brought 
up again, we may be sure, until some measure of 
justice shall have been secured. Any talk of 
disarmament that does not provide also for the 
disarmament of the landlord is a mere bandying 
of useless words. For, as we have seen, land- 
lordism is the main cause of militarism. And 
of the two, if we may judge by the comparative 
condition of the people of England where land- 
lordism has had full sway, and the people of 
Germany among whom militarism has come to 
its most perfect flower, we are forced to ad- 

108 



LAND AND WAR 

mit that of the two curses landlordism is the 
more disastrous. 

If England, with the help of her powerful 
allies and the sympathy of the neutral world, 
can lift from the back of the German people 
the burden of militarism, and if the German 
people can reciprocate this favor by lifting from 
the back of the English people the burden of 
landlordism, grown to monstrous proportions 
through the centuries, a solid foundation of 
friendship will have been established between 
the future generations of the two countries, and 
the present war will have gone far toward de- 
serving that enviable title, the War to End War. 



109 



EMPIEE OE FEDERATION 



V 

EMPIRE OR FEDERATION 

IP any one liad said, during those unsettled 
years immediately following the American 
Eevolution when the thirteen states that had 
been allies during the conflict were falling apart, 
each jealously guarding its own separate iden- 
tity, that within one hundred and twenty-five 
years there would be, extending from sea to sea, 
one Government which would be the arbiter of 
all disputes among them and that this Govern- 
ment would maintain peace within her vast bor- 
ders, even going so far as to interfere in local 
affairs when the state refused or was unable to 
keep peace, ninety-nine men out of a hundred 
would probably have jeered at such a prophecy. 
Internationally we are to-day in a situation 
fundamentally identical with that in which our 
states were immediately following the Eevolu- 
tion. And to-day as yesterday, eyes are looking 
into the future to glimpse if possible what is to 
be the outcome of it all, for it is evident that this 

113 



THE WOELD STOEM AND BEYOND 

clashing of nation with nation cannot go on 
forever. The business of humanity is growth 
and development, and the intelligence of man- 
kind can be counted upon eventually to take hold 
of this international problem and prevent the 
hurling of one people against another by state 
rivalry. Even were there nothing at stake 
more important to the world than trade, it 
is inconceivable that intelligent human beings 
will tolerate indefinitely the confusion and de- 
struction which are now the order of the day. 
And it is to this consideration more prob- 
ably than to the higher ones of morality that 
we may look for an ending of the business 
of war. For in the last analysis this thing 
which we call trade is the physical nervous sys- 
tem over which the finer sentiments of mankind 
flash to and fro to the ends of the earth. And 
more than once in the history of the world have 
commercial considerations supplied the main 
motive for larger political unions. It was this, 
we remember, that started the movement which 
resulted in the establishment of our own Federal 
Union. 

There was a time when the people of Holland 
were content periodically to pick up their pos- 
sessions or such part of them as they could get 

114 



EMPIRE OR FEDERATION 

away with and flee before tlie sea, until finally 
the futility of this procedure struck home and 
dikes were built to hold back the ocean. What 
the Hollanders have done to secure for them- 
selves peace uninterrupted by the ravages of the 
sea, the brains of Europe may be depended upon 
to do against the intolerable ravages of war. 
And just as in any part of the world, if a people 
were threatened by the sea, they would, if they 
were wise, take counsel with Holland and ac- 
quaint themselves with the steps taken by that 
country to put an end to her menace, so we may 
be sure that sooner or later the nations of Eu- 
rope will turn to the United States of America 
for light upon the problem which now confronts 
them. For it is becoming evident that the po- 
litical evolution of Europe despite the innumer- 
able obstacles that stand in its way, will follow 
out in a general manner either those lines along 
which the United States have come, federation, 
or those other lines along which Germany and 
Russia have traveled in the building up of their 
nationality, conquest of the weaker by the 
stronger. There is no third way. 

And indeed if we will look into it, this second 
plan has already been tried at least five distinct 
times in the history of Europe. The Caesars 

115 



THE WORLD STORM AND BEYOND 

tried it and were never able to extend their 
power beyond the Rhine. Charlemagne tried it 
and, while he succeeded in pushing the boun- 
daries of his empire northward to the Baltic, 
in the South, Spain and southern Italy remained 
aloof. The Fredericks and the Ottos tried it 
and their failure postponed for centuries the 
rise of modern Germany. Charles V tried it 
and in the very heart of his empire, France, 
despite the forces hurled against her, was able 
to maintain her independence. Napoleon tried 
it and for all his unequaled ability as a con- 
queror, the North and East remained unsub- 
dued. And every one of these partial successes 
toward the unification of Europe has been fol- 
lowed by a break-up; in every case blood and 
treasure have been lavished in vain. 

And yet, as though the people of Europe were 
unaware of all this, for a sixth time it is being 
tried. East and west, Germany is hurling her 
might against those eternal walls at the base 
of which, forgotten it would seem, lie the bones 
of the ancestors of the present armies. And 
already, as though Nature had determined to 
convince the people of Europe that they are go- 
ing about it in the wrong way, despite the un- 
paralleled slaughter, the like of which none of 

116 



EMPIRE OR FEDERATION 

the other would-be conquerors of the Continent 
ever knew, the surge has been checked, the iron 
lines that were to encircle Europe are at bay. 
The lesson which it took France, under Napo-^ 
leon, twenty years to learn, and the Romans 
centuries, Germany is learning in a few months. 
Is it possible that Europe will require further 
proof that she is pursuing the wrong course to- 
ward peace and unity? Will she still persist in 
her madness until that Power, which is ever 
working toward the unification of separated 
peoples, finally relents and gives Europe hei" 
heart's desire — at the hands of Russia? 

Will Italy and France wait until by some new 
alliance — alliances are ever changing — the at- 
present disrupted Teutonic peoples are brought 
into a menacing unity, and one by land and the 
other by sea go forth together to accomplish the 
inevitable ? Will England wait until some flash 
of common interest and common desire for those 
rich and widely separated parts of her empire 
shall unite against her the peoples of the Con- 
tinent ? Will Germany wait until that which lit- 
tle Belgium has suffered at the hands of Ger- 
many, Germany in her turn shall suffer at the 
hands of the over-flowing population of Russia? 
One thing is certain : if after the present war the 

117 



THE WOELD STOEM AND BEYOND 

lesson of tlie ages is still not learned, that sym- 
pathy which, despite their continued folly, the 
world still feels for the separated peoples of Eu- 
rope will not be forthcoming when the sword of 
the Slav shall come down and put an end forever 
to their dissensions. 

When the smoke of the present war has blown 
away and it has become clear even to the blind 
that for nineteen hundred years the peoples of 
Europe have been vainly struggling in the cul- 
de-sac of an imperial state, prophets upon the 
mountain tops will turn their eyes across the 
sea, and as America has in many instances 
profited by the experience of Europe, Europe in 
turn will profit by the experience of America. 
We may not have distinguished ourselves in a 
world way in the arts ; we may not have worked 
out so well as Europe some of those social and 
municipal problems which are daily becoming 
more acute, but in this at least we stand su- 
preme : we have solved the problem of the uni- 
fication of states; we have demonstrated be- 
yond controversy that it is possible for sepa- 
rated governments to interwork under the sup- 
erintendence of one, and that all this is not in- 
consistent with the expansion of the liberty of 
the individual. So much at least we have ac- 

118 



EMPIRE OB FEDERATION 

complislied, and after a hundred and twenty-five 
years of experience we believe that our system 
as a whole is sound and capable of successful 
operation in any part of the world. 

Europe, of course, has obstacles to overcome 
in the application of the American system which 
our forefathers had not to face. The inhabi- 
tants of the thirteen Colonies were virtually a 
unit in race, in religion, and in their conception 
of the relation between the state and the indi- 
vidual. And, furthermore, a common language 
underwarped their every-day life and pre- 
served, despite their multifarious political and 
commercial rivalries, all the essentials of broth- 
erhood. And therefore the task which confronted 
the statesmen of our Revolutionary period was 
of a superficial nature and easy of performance 
as compared with that which confronts Euro- 
pean statesmen to-day. It is difficult for us in 
America to realize the height and extent of the 
barriers that must be overcome before the peo- 
ple of Europe may permanently settle down to 
the enjoyment of that order and security which 
we who have grown up in it have come to regard 
as a natural endowment, like space and air. 

Instead of one race, Europe has at least three, 
of such magnitude and influence in continental 

119 



THE WOELD STOEM AND BEYOND 

affairs that no effort toward unification is in 
the least worth while that does not meet with 
the approval of all three. The Latin race, com- 
posed of the Italians, the French, the Spanish 
and the Portuguese peoples ; the Teutonic race, 
made up of the English, the German, the Aus- 
trian, the Dutch, the Swede, the Norwegian, and 
the Dane; and the Slavonic race, embracing 
chiefly the Eussian proper and the Pole, whether 
in Eussia or in Germany or in Austria, together 
with almost all the Balkan peoples, and many 
others chiefly in the Austrian provinces — all 
these must somehow be reconciled and brought 
to a knowledge of their fundamental identity 
and to a willingness to give and take to the end 
that strife among them may be put away. 

The difficulty inherent in the bringing together 
of these alien elements is accentuated when we 
remember that these three races represent on the 
whole three distinct religions or rather three dis- 
tinct branches of one religion. The Latin is, of 
course, mainly Eoman Catholic, the Teuton 
chiefly Protestant, while the Slav belongs on the 
whole to the Orthodox or Greek Catholic Church. 
And between these, between even the two con- 
servative branches, the Eoman Catholic and the 
Greek Catholic, the differences, far from being 

120 



EMPIRE OR FEDERATION 

superficial, strike deep into their essential struc- 
ture. On the other hand, as a solid beam run- 
ning the full length and reinforcing these three 
pieces is the mighty secular age that is growing 
up. Yesterday enlightened Europe was the bat- 
tle-ground of fighting faiths. To-day even the 
Turk, whose sword once swept the earth at the 
call of the Prophet, is deaf to the preaching of 
a holy war. Slowly but surely out of the wreck- 
age of narrow sects and religions a single spa- 
cious temple is rising to be the home of a new 
and united humanity. 

Sooner or later the nations will follow the 
sects, though the lines of the former are la- 
mentably slow in disappearing. So far as those 
of the Latin stock are concerned, they seem to 
have passed through that passion for empire 
from which England too is just emerging into a 
strange lassitude, and with which Germany, 
whose youth, as we have seen, has been pro- 
longed, is so aflame. And the Slav, solitary 
there in the North, is just entering the period 
of his nationality, and has had so little inter- 
course with the other nations of Europe that off- 
hand we should say that he would probably 
be distrustful of any suggestions of federation. 
And yet if we are wise we will ponder long the 

121 



THE WOELD STORM AND BEYOND 

character and history of this people before we 
venture upon such an assumption. The Slav in 
many respects, owing to his mingling with the 
Oriental, is older and more mature than either 
the Latin or the Teuton. And, as I have tried 
to show elsewhere, he is instinctively more co- 
operative and by nature more capable of broth- 
erhood than many of his apparently more ad- 
vanced neighbors. That this is no fancy at once 
becomes evident when we remember that it was 
at the initiative of the present Czar of Rus- 
sia that there was established as a preliminary 
step to a greater union the Hague Court which, 
discredited though it now is, was at least a prof ^ 
f er of brotherhood. And as a further reminder 
to the world that is too prone to forget the 
nobler side of Russian character, who was it that 
exactly one hundred years before the outbreak 
of the present war proposed to the nations of 
Europe "a league of which the principle was to 
be obligatory mediation, and which should aim, 
among other objects, at framing a code of the 
law of nations''? Alexander I, Czar of Russia. 
With what feeling must Europe now look back 
upon that offer ! 

And, in respect of language, consider, as com- 
pared to America of the Revolution, the babel of 

122 



EMPIRE OE FEDERATION 

tongues that cry division through Europe. We 
in America, into whose wide and vital language 
alien tongues disappear as streams disappear 
into the ocean, understand virtually nothing of 
the difficulties which are bred of these linguis- 
tic differences. Of the problem which Austria- 
Hungary has encountered in the face of this con- 
fusion, we know something. And Europe is but 
a larger Austria-Hungary. But Austria's dif- 
ficulty, we must remember, arose from the fact 
that she sought this blending of tongues to fur- 
ther her own despotic domination, whereas the 
spirit of federation is in its very nature con- 
ciliatory. 

Though marked, the differences which we 
have enumerated are in reality much less im- 
portant than they appear and may confidently 
be expected to give way when once the people 
realize that permanent peace is absolutely im- 
possible until some greater union is brought 
about. Certainly when they once understand 
that it is possible to establish a United States 
of Europe without seriously interfering with 
these local interests, we may be sure that the 
chief obstacle to the attainment of the great 
union will have been removed. If they can be 
made to see, for instance, that Italy may still be 

123 



THE WOELD STORM AND BEYOND 

Italy, that Russia may still go on with her na- 
tional development, that each nation may con- 
tinue to work out in its own way its peculiar 
destiny, retaining even its monarch — if after the 
present war there are such things — it is incon- 
ceivable, when the people once fully understand 
this, that they will allow their petty jealousies 
of one another to prevent the coming of that 
one which all may hail as a common savior. 

The only obstacle of serious aspect that 
stands in the way of this larger union is, of 
course, the character of the new thing and its 
relation to its creators. And it is upon this 
phase of the matter that the experience of 
America may be of infinite value in determining 
what that character and those relations should 
be. For in this most important respect, 
America's problem of yesterday and Europe's 
problem of to-day are identical. 

In the first place, then, if Europe is wise 
she will read the political history of America 
from the first appearance of the Colonies as free 
states and will dwell long upon that rudimen- 
tary union which they first formed and will con- 
sider carefully its workings between the estab- 
lishment of peace and the adoption of the Con- 
stitution. For it was during this period that 

124 



EMPIRE OR FEDERATION 

America solved the vital problems of union, the 
neglect of which has again brought Europe to 
the verge of destruction. In these pages she 
will find among independent states the same 
reluctance to a larger union which for centuries 
has marked the history of Europe. A thousand 
years hence when the World State has been 
firmly established, the political work of the 
Anglo-Saxon will probably stand out as his su- 
preme contribution. And nowhere thus far has 
his marvelous political vision led him more di- 
rectly to the true path than it did in America in 
that important decade between 1780 and 1790. 
For if we omit the period of the war when for- 
eign pressure held the thirteen states together, 
five years of independent life were sufficient to 
demonstrate conclusively to the people of the 
separate states that independence was incon- 
sistent with their highest development. And 
they began forthwith to lay the foundations of a 
''more perfect union" than that under which 
they had lived hitherto. And in looking over 
the efforts which they made to get light upon the 
problem of union, we are struck with the breadth 
of knowledge which the leaders of the union 
movement had gathered from the history and 
experience of other peoples. Every virtue and 

125 



THE WOELD STOEM AND BEYOND 

every flaw in the political systems of the past, 
from the Delphic Amphictiony to the Union of 
the Swiss Cantons, are at their tongues' ends, 
and they are able and willing to profit by 
the mistakes of others. Similarly, European 
statesmen, if they are wise, will profit by the 
mistakes of our forefathers. 

One of these mistakes which became apparent 
almost immediately after peace had been estab- 
lished was the idea which had prevailed from 
the very beginning of their separation from 
England, that a loose confederation would be 
sufficient. That Europe had not profited in this 
regard by the experience of America is evident 
in the faith and large expectations which she 
placed in the Hague Court. Foolish as we now 
see that our forefathers were and as they them- 
selves within a few years realized, to their credit 
it must be said that at no time even in their 
most complete isolation were they so visionary 
as to imagine that a mere court of arbitration 
would serve any practical purpose. Their very 
first efforts to bring about a closer relation be- 
tween the states resulted in a congress with 
power compared to which, weak as it was, was 
immeasurably more adequate than that exer- 
cised by the Hague Court. The Continental 

126 



EMPIRE OE FEDEEATION 

Congress was a sincere effort toward union, 
whereas the Hague Court is something obvi- 
ously set up for no other purpose, it would seem, 
than to gratify the aspirations of certain well- 
meaning idealists among the nations. Conceive 
of the legislative and executive departments of 
any of our large cities, especially its police sys- 
tem, to he suddenly abolished, leaving only the 
courts, and these exercising, not as now, power 
to compel to come before them those charged 
with crime, but acting as arbitrators only when 
requested, and you have a comical picture in all 
its dignity of the Hague Court among the na- 
tions. Compare to this pale, do-nothing judi- 
ciary the first Continental Congress that met 
under the Articles of Confederation. Among 
these Articles which marked the first serious 
get-together movement among the new states, 
we find the following provisions. Imagine even 
these in force in Europe before August 1, 1914, 
and conceive what might now be the happy con- 
dition of the continent: 

No vessels of war shall be kept in time of peace by 
any State, except such number only as shall be deemed 
necessary by the United States, in Congress assembled, 
for the defense of such State or its trade ; nor shall any 
body of forces be kept up by any State in time of 

127 



THE WOELD STORM AND BEYOND 

peace, except such number only as, in the judgment 
of the United States, in Congress assembled, shall be 
deemed requisite to garrison the forts necessary for the 
defense of such State ; . . . 

No State shall engage in any war without the con- 
sent of the United States, in Congress assembled, un- 
less such State be actually invaded by enemies, or shall 
have received certain advice of a resolution being 
formed by some nation ... to invade such State, 
and the danger is so imminent as not to admit of a 
delay, till the United States, in Congress assembled, 
can be consulted; nor shall any State grant commis- 
sions to any ships or vessels of war, nor letters of mark 
or reprisal, except it be after a declaration of war by 
the United States, in Congress assembled, and then only 
against the kingdom or State, and the subjects thereof, 
against which war has been so declared, and under 
such regulations as shall be established by the United 
States, in Congress assembled, . . . 

The United States, in Congress assembled, shall have 
the sole and exclusive right and power of determining 
on peace and war, except in the cases mentioned. . . . 

The United States, in Congress assembled, shall also 
be the last resort on appeal in all disputes now subsist- 
ing or that hereafter may arise between two or more 
States concerning boundary, jurisdiction, or any other 
cause whatever ; — 

And for the further strengthening of the new 
union, the aforesaid Congress was authorized 
to appoint a committee, one delegate from each 
state, to sit in the recess of Congress, and such 
other committees and officers as might be neces- 

128 



EMPIRE OR FEDERATION 

sary for managing the general affairs of the 
United States under their direction. 

Here, more than a century and a quarter ago, 
was an experiment in political union which so 
far as any influence it has had upon efforts to- 
ward international union, might as well never 
have been made. Nowhere among European 
statesmen do we find that open mind, that eager- 
ness to get light upon the problem of the larger 
state, which characterized the early Americans 
in a similar condition of disunion. Time and 
again, as we have seen, they have plunged into 
the abyss of war, cherishing the vain hope that 
somehow or other the bubble of empire might 
light upon them. And when peace has returned 
and the old question of how war may be avoided 
for the future has again pushed to the front, 
never has any serious suggestion led toward the 
path of federation, but always it has seemed that 
peace was to be found along the lines of more 
highly developed nationalities, and then by so 
grouping these nationalities and so balancing 
one group against another that the least tamper- 
ing with the foundations would inevitably bring 
down the whole mass. In a word, the European 
mind, despite its centuries of experience in state 
building, has thus far shown itself incapable of 

129 



THE WOELD STOEM AND BEYOND 

seeing beyond a loose political dualism. In the 
face of failure after failure, they have continued 
with childlike trust to build upon the sand of al- 
liances. When a strong nation has been won 
away to the other side, decades of hatred of 
that nation have suddenly disappeared and 
shouts have gone up over the new camp-fellow 
as though this time the good fortune were to be 
eternal. And this has gone on with fatuous illu- 
sion, generation after generation. How often 
have the capitals of Europe thrilled at the rumor 
of a new ally ! To-day it is the czar, to-morrow 
Italy, and the next day the Japanese. Kings 
have become popular and statesmen famous by 
the mere signing up of a new companion-in- 
arms. Cabinets have fallen because this ad- 
vantage has been lost. Indeed, the main pur- 
pose of European statesmanship has been the 
forging of stronger alliances. 

In this respect, the ambassadors of European 
nations lead the world. How thoroughly ac- 
quainted they are with every vital need and 
secret ambition of the state which they may hap- 
pen at the time to be seeking as an ally! And 
with what finesse and profound understanding 
are the advantages of such an alliance pre- 
sented! And once secured, what incalculable 

130 



EMPIEE OR FEDERATION 

sums of money are often advanced to render the 
new ally capable of the most powerful support in 
time of war ! 

And in this respect what marvels have been 
accomplished! Like the fleets of the Lillipu- 
tians, nation has been pulled from nation. The 
ends of the earth have been brought together. 
At a stroke of the pen those *' eternal'^ racial 
antipathies about which we have been hearing 
so much, have completely vanished. Between 
England and France, between the German and 
the Turk, between the Russian and the Japanese, 
a wonderful love appears. And all these prodi- 
gious labors have been spent solely to bring 
about cooperation in time of war. Toward co- 
operation in time of peace and for peaceful pur- 
poses, toward union, toward a United States 
of Europe, nothing has been done. We have 
Gladstones and Bismarcks and Cavours, but not 
one single European statesman. As far as po- 
litical vision is concerned Julius 'CsBsar, two 
thousand years ago, saw as far as they. And it 
is from these nations that the dream now goes 
forth to rule the world ! 

For anything potential of the slightest ad- 
vantage in the time of war, the European mind 
has been as marvelously open as was the mind 

131 



THE WOELD STORM AND BEYOND 

of the Greek to the beauties of art. If in the 
remotest corner of the globe some new explosive 
has shown itself in the test-tube of some labora- 
tory, how quickly has the rumor of it reached 
the cabinets of Europe, and with what per- 
sistence and with what stealth and with what 
corruption of men has the secret been sought 
out! Consider the war equipment of the Eu- 
ropean nations and see how cosmopolitan they 
are. The brains of the world are there. In 
dreadnought construction, in air craft, in mines 
and torpedoes, to the smallest device of shell 
extraction, how familiar is Europe with the 
best that America has produced! Indeed, this 
acquaintance with what we have done toward 
success in war is equaled only by the ignorance 
of what We have done to avert war. In 
nothing is the essential martial character of 
Europe more conspicuous than in its respect for 
American war inventions and its contempt for 
American peace inventions. Has a single Eu- 
ropean statesman read the history of the for- 
mation of the United States of America with 
any insight into its possible application to the 
European situation? To have read it as a book 
is one thing. To have read it as a page of life, 
luminous with divine guidance for the promo- 

132 



EMPIRE OR FEDERATION 

ters of a union of states, is quite a different 
thing. Do these builders of the Hague Court 
know, I wonder, that that first attempt of 
America toward union, centuries ahead of the 
Hague Court as it was in practical statesman- 
ship — do they know that a hundred and twenty- 
five years ago this attempt failed? And do they 
know why it failed? And have they ever con- 
sidered what our forefathers did to remedy 
these defects ? 

It is probably too much to expect, however, 
that an appreciation of what America has ac- 
complished in the science of government should 
show itself among the confident European 
statesmen before the conviction has struck bot- 
tom that their own systems have failed. To an 
outsider, with even the most general knowledge 
of the war cycles in European history, it would 
seem that that hour is already long overdue. 
Yet even now, torn as that continent again is 
with the strife of states, virtually all that we 
hear bearing upon the to-morrow of peace has 
to do in one way or another with the pernicious 
old idea of empire, with the British empire or 
the German empire or the Russian empire, and 
with guesses at which of these will achieve the 
ultimate dominion. Above the thunder of can- 

133 



THE WOELD STOEM AND BEYOND 

non and the wail of the wounded, not a voice 
from the inmost heart of any of the warring 
peoples is heard demanding that the nation 
cease its struggle for empire and enter with 
others upon the path of federation. Millions go 
singing down the road to death, clasping to their 
bosoms the hope of empire or the determination, 
hand in hand as allies, to hurl back the imperial 
legions. Perhaps when the war is over the na- 
tions of Europe will perceive the necessity of 
something more permanent than alliances. But 
just now, if such an aspiration exists, it lies com- 
pletely hidden under the smoke and tumult of 
war. 



134 



THE FALL OR RISE OF SOCIALISM 



VI 

THE FALL. OB RISE OP SOCIALISM 

FOR a time at least the ** menace of Social- 
ism" has been laid. That dark cloud 
which for years has been gathering over Europe, 
threatening the nations with revolution, has sud- 
denly been swallowed up by a thunder-storm, 
to avert which was one of the aims of Socialism. 
Therefore it is a double defeat that Socialism 
has suffered ; her dream of peace has been shat- 
tered, and that other dream, of more substantial 
promise — ^the rise of an international working- 
class which, with myriads of hands interlocked 
across boundaries and through alien tongues, 
was to establish brotherhood and bring in the 
new age, at least for the working-population 
of Europe — ^this orb, too, has passed behind the 
dark planet of war. Those elaborate plans for 
the overthrow of capitalism, that consuming 
passion and infectious self-sacrifice for a new 
and better order of daily life, those mighty lead- 
ers, and those strong lines of brave men, who, 

137 



THE WOELD STORM AND BEYOND 

with their feet upon the idea of nationality, were 
holding Europe together — ^little ridges of sand 
caught up as by a whirlwind and blown away. 
The German is German still, la telle France is 
mightier than Jaures, the troops that England 
is sending to the Continent are landing not as 
Socialists, but as soldiers. Once more it is 
made plain that the old is stronger than the new, 
that a passion that has had its home in the 
human heart for a thousand years will outlast 
the passion of yesterday. 

To a large class, the world over, this check 
and apparent collapse of Socialism is the one 
compensation for the horrors of the present 
war. For to a class living in affluence and se- 
curity, breathing the air of a perpetual Sans 
Souci, the killing and wounding of millions of 
men, the paralyzing of business, and the wide 
suffering spread abroad to a degree through all 
lands — all this, seen from the window, is at least 
to be preferred to hostile forces seriously at 
work under the foundations of the house. And 
it was the foundations of society, or of that 
part of society that is peculiarly interested 
in the preservation of the present order, that 
Socialism was sapping. And therefore a catas- 
trophe which diverts such forces from their sub- 

138 



THE FALL OR RISE OF SOCIALISM 

terranean attack comes to this class not without 
a certain cause for gratification. For the pres- 
ent war is in Europe, and its horrors are chiefly 
confined to that continent ; whereas the menace 
of Socialism was world-wide. And the present 
war, too, is a thing of the present, whereas So- 
cialism, could it have been triumphant, would 
have perpetuated itself beyond any possibility 
to foresee its end. And therefore the long sigh 
of relief that the menace is past. When the 
present war is over, society will settle down to 
work in the good old way. Karl Marx, that 
idol of millions, will take his place upon the shelf 
beside Owen and Fourier in that long line of 
dreamers of the impossible. 

And something of the same feeling that the 
great movement has suffered a severe set-back 
is shared by many of those to whom the ad- 
vancement of Socialism has been a life-work. 
Everywhere there is despair of vanished hopes, 
or at least an acute disappointment. And while 
the conviction still lingers that the cause which 
the now-atrophied thing represented is Just and 
that the long and arduous work of education has 
not been wholly in vain, it has come as a blow 
upon the head that a surge of such strength and 
such grandiose movement should suddenly be 

139 



THE WOELD STORM AND BEYOND 

arested and thrust under, while, as though no 
effort had been made to erase them, old national 
lines reappear. 

Despite this gratification and disappointment, 
however, it is quite possible that the surprise 
in this respect which the present war has oc- 
casioned may be equaled by another surprise 
which may come when the smoke and uproar 
have passed away. For this war is not some- 
thing which, meteor-like, without any connection 
with our world life, dropped upon us from the 
skies, and which will presently go back into the 
skies, leaving only ruined buildings and the 
scarred earth to remind humanity that a storm 
has passed. Slowly, through long years, it has 
projected itself from the soul of the peoples of 
Europe as an ear of corn is projected from its 
stalk. And when peace has returned, the con- 
sequences, we may be sure, will flood back into 
the soul of man and show themselves in all the 
activities of the future. To Socialists, there- 
fore, as well as to those who, for one reason 
or another, oppose Socialism, the point of vital 
concern is how seriously the ideal of Socialism 
has been affected by the present war ; in a word, 
whether what we have witnessed is indeed the 
downfall of Socialism or, as is not impossible, 

140 



THE FALL OR RISE OF SOCL^LISM 

a violent clearing away of those encumbrances 
for the removal of which the educational process 
was too slow. 

In speaking of the erasure of Socialism by na- 
tionalism, I have said that it is the erasure of 
the younger by the older, a creed of yesterday 
by a primal impulse that strikes its root far 
back in the past. And this is the popular view, 
that Socialism had its origin in Karl Marx, 
whereas we come upon the ruins of nations un- 
der the sand mounds of Egypt and Babylonia. 
But is this true? Did Socialism appear sud- 
denly upon the earth with the publication of 
Das Kapital, and has it, with no previous prep- 
aration, built that mighty structure, the collapse 
of which — if it has collapsed — ^has been heard 
above the thunder of cannon? Or did the pub- 
lication of that book simply release into a new 
channel forces which in one way or another 
had been operative since the beginning of the 
world? 

Socialism — ^what does Socialism mean? Evi- 
dently mass action as opposed to individual ef- 
fort. For when we eliminate the individual ac- 
cretions, when we boil down the thousand and 
one definitions by which men have sought to out- 
line and express the real meaning of this world- 

141 



THE WOELD STOEM AND BEYOND 

troubler, this is the residue, that it is an asso- 
ciated effort. That this effort during the last 
half-century has been consciously directed to- 
ward industrial ends, toward a more scientific 
production and a more equitable distribution, 
in no wise affects the great fact that the essence 
of Socialism is cooperation. And anything that 
stimulates cooperation, in whatever direction it 
may turn the energies of men, is certain to bring 
results that sooner or later will show themselves 
in every part of the social structure, just as at 
the coming of spring the awakening influence 
of this season is seen in every living portion of 
the landscape. 

Consider from this point of view the meaning 
of war. Here, it is evident, is the oldest So- 
cialist movement among men, the one enterprise 
in which in all times and in all countries men 
have shown not only a willingness, but a passion, 
to sacrifice themselves for what they conceived 
to be the common good. War alone has been 
the great corrector of the too highly developed 
self. That demon which we see to-day strew- 
ing the fields of Europe with the slain, he, it 
seems, was the first, as he is still the one in- 
spiring, instructor in the supreme glory of the 
effacement of the individual, or more exactly, 

142 



THE FALL OR EISE OF SOCIALISM 

let us say, in the creation of a social choir in 
which there is a happy blending and a joyous co- 
operation of parts. 

Time and again during the last eight months 
we have heard the expression, ''the war ma- 
chine." The term itself indicates a conscious- 
ness on the part of men that here is a social 
thing that is working toward a given end with 
that perfect unity of action which characterizes 
a piece of machinery. And not solely because 
of the monstrous work in which it is engaged, 
but also because of this nice adjustment of part 
to part and the smooth movement of the whole, 
we think of the thing as inhuman. Educated to 
the idea that life, to be life, must be a competi- 
tion between persons, that friction is somehow 
necessary to individual and social efficiency and 
well-being, we are sterile of images with 
which to set forth in human terms the marvel- 
ous cooperation of part with part and every 
part with the whole which we see in the national 
war movements in Europe, and therefore we 
call them machines. But if we will only watch 
the working of these machines in themselves, 
apart from their collision with one another, we 
shall find that there is something admirable 
here, something which as far surpasses the or- 

143 



THE WORLD STORM AND BEYOND 

ganization of the peaceful work of the world as 
harmony surpasses discord. 

How comes it we have neglected the real les- 
son of war and have clung only to the bloody 
husk? To what flaw in man's character or to 
what blunting of the finer faculties of the mind 
are we to ascribe the astounding fact that the 
machinery of death has been socialized while 
the machinery of life has been left competitive ; 
that when a nation goes forth to destroy there 
flashes through the millions of that nation a 
marvelous comradeship, and the moment the 
purpose of the war has been accomplished and 
the armies are disbanded to return to the ma- 
chinery of peaceful industry, these comrades are 
obliged to unlearn all those fine lessons in co- 
operation for the common good and begin again 
that competitive struggle with one another 
which in many ways is more cruel and destruc- 
tive both to the individual and to society than 
the armed conflict that is going on to-day? If 
we could withdraw ourselves from the social 
organism into which we are born and which we 
accept as the natural order of things, and view 
for the first time the activities of men, we should 
be much less surprised that men should go to 
war from the fierce struggle of a competitive 

144 



THE FALL OR RISE OF SOCL^LISM 

system than that they should return to a com- 
petitive system from that hand-in-hand adven- 
ture in cooperation and brotherhood in which, 
in these epic movements, from the first to the 
last drum-beat they are absorbed. Only when 
nation is attacking nation, it seems, are peoples 
capable of swarming forth in that unity of spirit 
to establish which as a permanent relation 
among men has been the supreme aim of ideal- 
ists since society began. 

It has been said — and of all arguments against 
Socialism this probably has been the most ef- 
fective — that only by competition of man with 
man is it possible to kindle and keep burning 
that divine flame of enthusiasm which is essen- 
tial to individual efficiency, and therefore that 
anything tending to eliminate competition would 
tend inevitably to reduce society to sluggish mo- 
notony. Yet from one end of Europe to the 
other, along lines of battle in which thousands 
of men, rivals of yesterday, are drawn up shoul- 
der to shoulder, cooperating with one another 
with such singleness of aim as to make almost 
sacrilegious the least suggestion of rivalry, 
along these interminable lines runs an enthu- 
siasm which it would be impossible to increase 
were every soldier fighting for his private gain. 

145 



THE WORLD STORM AND BEYOND 

Nowhere is there a thought of self, and yet 
everywhere there is ardor. Even that class- 
struggle beyond which many Socialists have 
been unable to see, the elimination of which they 
have declared to be impossible, has here com- 
pletely disappeared. Men eminent in the higher 
work of the world in days of peace, men rich 
in talent or in wealth, feel honored to serve in 
places however obscure in the present war. If 
competition of nation with nation in an armed 
enterprise, socialized as we see it is to the small- 
est detail, is sufficient to kindle so vast an en- 
thusiasm among men, why is it we imagine that 
a similar competition of nation with nation in 
the peaceful industries, socialized as are the 
present war movements, but working toward a 
divine purpose, the peaceful and joyous devel- 
opment of the race, would render the man apa- 
thetic? What a monstrous indictment of the 
moral order of the universe it would be were 
it true that cooperation for the common good 
is profitable only in war, but that in peace this 
same common good requires for its advancement 
the utmost license of man to prey upon man! 
Under a truth like this, could the human mind 
realize it, humanity would stagger to a despair 
darker even than that caused by present brutal 

146 



THE FALL OE EISE OF SOCIALISM 

catastrophe. For this would clang to forever 
the door of hope. 

Strangely enough, just as we are thinking 
these thoughts and wondering if it is indeed 
possible to kindle and keep alive in men engaged 
in their normal occupations of production some- 
thing of the enthusiasm which has been aroused 
by the present savage excitement, along comes 
one of the foremost of American manufacturers 
who, having caught a glimpse of the new age 
that is dawning, has for a year had his vast 
thousands at work upon a profit sharing basis, 
and testifies that so marvelous has been the in- 
crease of enthusiasm among the men to whom 
this good fortune has come that the company 
has found it necessary to hold them back lest 
in their overzeal they go too far. Now if this 
has been the result simply of a small sharing 
of the profits, is it unreasonable to suppose that 
even greater results of this kind would be ob- 
tained if the interest of these workers were ex- 
tended not only to profits, but to ownership 
also? He is a poor student of human nature 
who does not know that men are more interested 
in freedom than in wages. If this manufacturer 
or any other of our great employers is curious to 
know the full capacity of men for efficient pro- 

147 



THE WOELD STOEM AND BEYOND 

duction and for advancement toward a thrifty 
and self -helpful human life, let him begin a grad- 
ual distribution of ownership with the promise 
to the men that the plant shall be theirs just as 
soon as by a wise discharge of their increased 
responsibilities they can prove that they are 
capable of complete ownership. Then we shall 
see whether the business of killing men is more 
fruitful of enthusiasm than the healthful ac- 
tivities of peace and growth and independ- 
ence. 

But not only in the unity of emotion which 
it has engendered, but also in the practical work- 
ing of this emotion, the present war is probably 
the most perfect demonstration of the efiSciency 
of Socialism that the world has ever witnessed. 
To produce this efficient cooperation, what cen- 
turies of training have been required! How 
slow man has been to learn the advantage of 
applying even in war this great lesson ! When 
we remember that in the beginnings of society 
armed bands, the embryos of the present armies, 
were obliged somehow to find their own food, 
and that among all early states down even until 
within recent times, every soldier was expected 
to supply his own arms and equipment, it be- 
gins to dawn upon us that our present amazing 

148 



THE FALL OR RISE OF SOCIALISM 

efficiency in things military is due almost solely 
to the fact that the state of war has for cen- 
turies heen in process of socialization, that the 
individual who yesterday was obliged to take 
thought for his clothing, for his armor, even for 
his own food and shelter, has to-day only to 
do his duty as a soldier to be free of all these 
cares. The tocsin sounds, and the clothing ap- 
pears ; the rifle, instinct with life, it would seem, 
leaps to his hand ; for the cavalryman the horse 
with bridle and saddle is ready. For every man 
his implement is at hand. Long trains are in 
waiting, and with what unimaginable conveni- 
ences! Kitchens with cooks capped and 
aproned ; hospitals with doctors and nurses, cots 
and bandages, medicine for the least blister of 
the foot. A whole society is in motion. Com- 
forts such as men dream of in their homes are 
here in abundance. To the gathering millions, 
come, many of them, from long years of galling 
economy, it is as though some magician were 
abroad assembling out of the air these wonders. 
The age of childhood has returned. One has 
only to run to the great father and be fed with 
the most wholesome food, and clothed with the 
most scientific clothing, and have poured out at 
his feet such toys as the heart of a child never 

149 



THE WOELD STOEM AND BEYOND 

dreamed of; swords and guns and cannon of 
every description; trains and motors, subma- 
rines and flying-sMps ; search-lights for the 
night and wonderful telescopes for the day. 
And in what quantities ! Usually when a play- 
thing has been broken, there are days of depri- 
yation. Not so here. 

And once in motion, consider the care, the 
attention, which the great father bestows upon 
his children. Man who was yesterday an or- 
phan is to-day a cherished offspring. And of 
how devoted a father ! Every part of the equip- 
ment has been arranged with a view to the great- 
est facility and comfort of motion and repose, 
from the tooth-brush to the shoe cut to fit the 
exceptional foot. He has only to march and 
rest and eat. Where axes are needed, there are 
axes; for trenches there are spades. And on 
the firing-line he has only to shoot. The hand is 
there with the ammunition. And let him be 
wounded, and instantly the great father becomes 
the great mother. The despatch and thorough- 
ness with which he is attended are limited only 
by the capacity of the service. Not here neglect, 
with idle doctors all about. Money or no 
money, he is cared for. For once his real worth 
as a man is appreciated. This is the most as- 

150 



THE FALL OE EISE OF SOCIALISM 

tonishing thing about the present war. It has 
made of the miner, the mason, the factory-hand, 
the street-car conductor an asset of such value 
that for the first time it has become, with no 
opposition even from the capitalist press, the 
sacred duty of society to see not only that he 
is well fed and well clothed, but also that at the 
public expense he is supplied with doctors and 
nurses. And as he lingers between life and 
death, never a thought of who is to meet the ex- 
penses of the burial, never the hell that per- 
haps wife and children will starve. The great 
father and the great mother will provide for 
them. 

Never before in the history of the world, I 
repeat, has there been such a practical demon- 
stration of the Socialist theory — the theory that 
somehow or other the individual would be better 
off and society better off if the latter would take 
charge of that part of the business of life which 
is necessary to the efficiency of the individual 
whether in peace or in war. 

What do those who claim that Socialism has 
fallen understand by Socialism? Because the 
Socialists of Germany and France and England 
and Eussia failed to prevent the present war or, 
further, at the first shot sprang at one another ^s 

i5i 



THE WOELD STOEM AND BEYOND 

throat, has Socialism therefore failed? Are 
there still intelligent people who do not know 
that the prevention of war has nothing to do 
with the essential aim of Socialism, but is sim- 
ply one of those things of minor importance 
which Socialism hopes to accomplish in its great 
march? It would be strange indeed if the lead- 
ers of a great modern movement that had for 
its aim the reorganization of society did not see 
that the real objective of any social crusade 
worthy of the name is the socialization of the 
days of peace. The ending of war, however de- 
sirable, is subordinate to this, the betterment 
of the normal life. For who does not see that 
we do not end war when we put a stop to war 
between nations? It is only the most superfi- 
cial view of war that would confine its meaning 
to a conflict between states. Any wide social 
struggle that is attended in its natural course 
by great suffering is war. For the essence of 
war is a needless competition, whether between 
states or corporations or individuals, that results 
in wide-spread suffering. No one acquainted 
with the social conditions among vast masses of 
the population of ahnost every nation can fail to 
be aware that even before August 1, 1914, some 
great destroyer was abroad. It is unnecessary 

152 



THE FALL OE RISE OF SOCIALISM 

to dwell upon these things. We need, in pass- 
ing, to pick out only one fact: there is no child 
labor in war. 

Imagine what it must be like to thousands 
of those now in the armies of Europe to wake 
in the morning with the new sensation that the 
day's wants have been provided for, to have 
fall into their laps, as though the heavens had 
opened, such unfamiliar comforts as mittens and 
overcoats. For undoubtedly there are in these 
vast hosts countless numbers who know what 
it is to walk shabbily clad the streets of Paris 
and Berlin and London and Petrograd, won- 
dering where the next meal is to come from 
and where they are to find lodging for the night, 
or who, falling sick, have been tormented with 
the thought of what will become of them. There 
are thousands of fathers, doubtless, who will hurl 
themselves upon the bayonets of the enemy with 
less anguish, knowing that, if they fall, their 
families will be better taken care of than if they 
were to die in their own beds, having been 
brought home injured from the field or the mine 
or the workshop. In a word, there are in these 
vast hosts that face one another in Europe to- 
day multitudes who will find conditions of life 
on the march and in the trenches preferable to 

153 



THE WOELD STORM AND BEYOND 

those from wMch they were mustered to the 
present war. 

Was there ever such an opportunity for ef- 
fective propaganda as that which the present 
extraordinary circumstances have supplied? 
Thick within the lines of march, among the 
trenches, in the hospitals, are those who under- 
stand and can explain why it is that the great 
father, absent in time of peace, is present in 
time of war. And there will be leisure between 
battles, between charges, between the coming 
and going of nurses, for discussion of this 
strange anomaly. And we may be sure that 
there will be many a hard-handed philosopher of 
the trenches who will make clear this monstrous 
paradox. And with what freedom of speech, 
what security from police interference ! Mouths 
that yesterday were muzzled are to-day un- 
stopped. For the first time in Europe Socialism 
is being heard. Certainly for the first time it 
is being seen. And that is half the victory. 
Hitherto it has been necessary for the mission- 
aries of Socialism to present a theory. They 
have been on the defensive for lack of a prac- 
tical demonstration. This more than anything 
else was the crying weakness of their cause. 
They had nothing to which they could point as 

154 



THE FALL OE RISE OF SOCL^LISM 

proof that their theories were workable. Just 
then, as though some high god had lifted the 
barriers into a new age, the very state that had 
opposed them and throttled them to the very 
limit of its power found itself demonstrating the 
proof of their claims. 

And now, with this great experiment in actual 
operation, it will be easy to show that our war 
system is centuries ahead of our peace system, 
and that the chief reason for this is that peace 
has refused to learn anything from war, while 
war has listened with open mind, and has util- 
ized for its improvement every idea that peace 
has brought forth. There has not been one dis- 
covery or ihvention that peace has added to her 
equipment which could possibly be of use in 
war that has not been appropriated and, if nec- 
essary, altered to meet the new requirements. 
From the simplest sword clear on up to the 
most complex dreadnought, the whole intricate 
machinery of war had its root in some tool or 
other which the aboriginal man used in food- 
getting or in his early industries. War differs 
from peace, therefore, simply in its receptive- 
ness to ideas. Compared with modem methods 
of producing and distributing the necessaries 
of life, our latest methods of destroying life 

155 



THE WORLD STORM AND BEYOND 

are vastly more scientific. For while war has 
absorbed all the knowledge and adopted all the 
excellent devices of peace, that one vital thing 
which more than any other accounts for the 
conspicuous success of martial enterprises, the 
harmonious interworking of the individual with 
the common good, has thus far had no meaning 
to humanity. With the unbuckling of the sword, 
the great society has disappeared. 

We sometimes think that the distinguishing 
characteristic of war is the killing and maim- 
ing of men ; but it is evident that this is not the 
real distinction, for men are killed and maimed 
in time of peace. The essential and the one 
marked difference is this, that during war a 
nation is a society, whereas in peace it is an 
aggregate of individuals. So true is this, in- 
deed, that if a denizen from some other world, 
acquainted with our normal activities during 
peace, should visit us now when we are at war, 
he would have difficulty in recognizing in this 
smoothly moving, harmonious unit the disorgan- 
ized welter of yesterday. Compared with the 
spirit that animates a society at war, the dis- 
integration that inevitably ensues when the 
sword is laid aside is in all practical respects 
like the dissolution which sets in in the body 

156 



THE FALL OR RISE OF SOCIALISM 

of a man when the spirit has taken its 
flight. 

Conceive of the immeasurable bridge over 
which, when the present war is done, the soldiers 
of the different nations will be obliged to pass. 
It will be like a transit from one world to an- 
other. All those splendid ties of comradeship, 
that extraordinary devotion to the common wel- 
fare, the almost romantic attachment of the part 
to the whole, will dissolve as a vapor. That 
powerful state whose energy and watchful care 
were everywhere fathering its millions will also 
have come to an end. And in its place there will 
be another state as different from the former as 
one thing can be different from another. The 
socialism of war will give way to the individ- 
ualism of peace. Society will become unsocial. 
Once the rifles are stacked, once the uniform is 
laid aside, there is severed that intimate bond 
between father and children. Instantly the re- 
lation between the individual and the state 
becomes one of cold formality. That man who 
in the battle-line was so precious, so deserv- 
ing of every attention, becomes a thing of 
little concern. Henceforth his willingness to 
serve society is not enough to guarantee him 
even his daily bread. He is an outcast from the 

157 



THE WORLD STORM AND BEYOND 

great home. So long as poverty does not drive 
him to crime, there is no limit to the misery into 
which, so far as the state is concerned, this sol- 
dier of peace may not wander. Orphaned, he 
must now shift for himself. If his labor is re- 
quired in some other part of the country than 
that in which he finds himself, there is no free 
transportation for him now, as he sets forth 
with his tools in his hands, as there was yester- 
day when he girded on his sword. And if for 
any reason his tools become useless, he must 
supply himself or go without. And the gen- 
erals of production, the Frenches, the Joffres, 
the Hindenburgs, and the grand dukes of in- 
dustry, may exploit him to their hearts ' content, 
may dismiss him into starvation. The great 
father will nowhere interfere except it be to pre- 
vent the very thing which in war he insisted 
upon. Let it be voiced in any of the cities from 
which the present armies have been mustered 
that in peace, too, for the common good, private 
property should be seized as it was seized in 
war, and those very governments which led in 
commandeering the machinery of peace will be 
the first to stifle the suggestion that this tried 
and proved policy be continued. It is only in 
war that the state has independent action; in 

158 



THE FALL OR RISE OF SOOIALISM 

peace it is controlled by the captains of industry. 
When the exigencies of war require the drafting 
of boys of sixteen or eighteen years of age, so- 
ciety becomes alarmed; but there is no alarm 
when children much younger are drafted into 
the ranks of life-destroying labor. It is the un- 
usual, not the unjust, that shocks us. 

Sooner or later, if the world is to stand and 
mankind is to continue to advance, Peace will 
have to go to school to War to learn the art 
of caring for men. That divine altruism which 
we see fusing in one great glow the armies in 
Europe to-day will somehow have to be blown 
abroad through the infinite to-morrows. The 
millions who in the trenches to-day see on every 
hand the manifold advantages of cooperation 
will not forever tolerate the lack of this fine 
thing in times of peace. Not forever will a 
mere extension of boundaries and huge indem- 
nities to be used by the state in the preparation 
for further wars be accepted by men as com- 
pensation for the bloodshed and ruin of homes. 
Something more personal must be their reward, 
something that will lighten the burdens of their 
daily life and infuse through their daily labor 
that sense of comfort and that rare spirit of 
co-partnership which is the sustaining power of 

159 



THE WOELD STOEM AND BEYOND 

the armies to-day. When these millions return, 
scarred and hardened, from the great adven- 
ture, from destinies which their own hands have 
shaped, it will be with a stirring consciousness 
of mighty power, of ability to grapple and over- 
throw. Does any one imagine that this newly 
discovered power will thereafter lie quiescent 
under the narrowing conditions that obtained in 
the past? 

And not alone in the rank and file must this 
inevitable transformation come about. Cap- 
tains of industry who in the various nations 
lead the vast armies of labor will also, sooner 
or later, under the urge of the new spirit, find 
themselves modeling their leadership after that 
of the great men who to-day command the 
armed millions of Europe. Imagine the fine 
scorn that would flash across the face of any 
of these men should the governments they are 
serving offer them headquarters floored with 
expensive rugs and hung with costly tapestries 
and filled with every imaginable dainty of food 
and drink such as the monarchs of Asia in the 
long ago took with them into the field of war. 
Imagine the indignation which such a proposi- 
tion would arouse should it be explained, as it 
need not be explained, that these luxuries were 

160 



THE FALL OR RISE OF SOCLiLISM 

to be provided by a cutting down of the necessi- 
ties of the common soldiers. Enough for these 
modem leaders to know that they are serving 
their countries and helping on as best they can 
the heroic work in which their nations are en- 
gaged. This is the lesson which our leaders of 
peace may learn from the leaders of war. It 
is evident that half the problems of life would 
be solved if something of this rare spirit could 
find its way into the mills and factories of the 
world. For call it Socialism or Christianity or 
Christian Socialism, very clearly it is this more 
than anything else that we need if we are to put 
an end to the barbarism of peace. 



161 



HAS THE CHUECH COLLAPSED? 



vn 

HAS THE CHUECH COLLAPSED? 

RECENTLY, when the Eheims cathedral 
was bombarded, a cry went up from en- 
lightened lands that a work of art had been de- 
stroyed. Here, if we only realized it, was the 
most complete indictment of the church that 
was ever made. For what could be more pain- 
ful to a person or an institution that had once 
been a power in the world than to be utterly for- 
gotten? Far better the most rabid denuncia- 
tion. And a century ago this proof of the vi- 
tality of the church would not have been lack- 
ing. Indeed, a decade ago the falling of bombs 
upon the ancient roof would have called forth 
at least a sneer from free-thinkers the world 
over. But to-day even this praise is denied 
her. Amid the general indignation, even the 
clergy seem to have forgotten that it is a house 
of God that has suffered disaster. It has ceased 
even to be incongruous one day to pray to Je- 
hovah for success for the German guns and 
the next to turn those guns upon a cathedral. 

165 



THE WOELD STOEM AND BEYOND 

Something has severed the connection between 
this building and the high heavens, for the sigh 
of the world is only that a work of art has been 
destroyed. The beauty of the nave has out- 
lasted the religion of the altar. Apollo has tri- 
umphed over the Christ. 

And all this has come about as naturally as 
ripe fruit falls from a bough. For no one im- 
agines that it is the sudden shock, the excite- 
ment of war, that has diverted attention from 
the church. That which we have witnessed is 
simply a unique registering of an ancient fact. 
For, as we all know, it was during years of 
peace that the spirit of the church was bom- 
barded. That which fell yesterday upon the 
heart of the world was merely the beautiful 
stones of an old Christian temple that, though 
we were only half aware of it, had long ago 
taken its place with Kamak and the Parthenon. 
It is this splendid isolation, this slow conversion 
of a sectarian house of worship into a monu- 
ment of art, that has made possible the world- 
wide regret that even war should violate this 
treasure of humanity. At last, after centuries 
as a shrine of a narrow doctrine, the old build- 
ing has become a thing of wide human concern. 
Shintoist and Hindu, Mohammedan and Chris- 

166 



HAS THE CHUECH COLLAPSED? 

tian, all these may now in unison cry out as from 
a personal wound. 

While never before, probably, was such a tri- 
bute paid to art in its general character, it is 
the profound change which this indicates in the 
Christian world that surprises us most, not be- 
cause we were not aware that a profound change 
had taken place, but because now for the first 
time we are face to face with the thing that 
registers infallibly the full ebb of the tide. And 
very clearly it is not an ebb from one shore, 
with a corresponding flow upon another, as it 
invariably is with the movements of the ocean, 
but an ebb complete and world-wide. And only 
yesterday Wordsworth was lamenting the loss 
of the classical age. Only this morning it 
seems, the sighing of Swinburne ^s "Last Ora^- 
cle" was in our ears: **Thou hast conquered, 
Galilean." And here almost in one lightning 
flash the pagan world is restored ! 

It is high time to put away pretenses and 
face realities. The world's New Year's day is 
upon us, and if we are wise, we will set down 
in our inventory only those things which we ac- 
tually have on hand. If there are empty boxes 
upon our shelves, let us mark them empty boxes. 
For, though we seem not to realize it, it is quite 

167 



THE WOELD STORM AND BEYOND 

as important to know exactly wliat spiritual re- 
sources we can count on in peace and war as 
it is to know exactly what military equipment 
we possess. No surprise wliicli the present war 
has caused us in any way compares with that 
first amazement over our spiritual unprepared- 
ness. Ignorantly or deliberately we had been 
deceived. Time and again we had been told by 
those who claimed to know about such things 
that our moral forces were amply sufficient to 
hold back the deluge that has overwhelmed us. 
And we shall be deceived again if we do not 
immediately wipe off our books the padded fig- 
ures that are responsible for this delusion. 

Let us understand at the outset that it is no 
more discreditable for an institution to die than 
it is for a man to die. Only when death has 
been hastened by a violation of the higher law 
does the event become a proper subject for 
moralists. Then there is a lesson to be learned. 
The mistakes of yesterday become the guide- 
posts of to-day and the wisdom of to-morrow. 
And the to-morrow that is now dawning will 
need all the wisdom that we can extract from 
the past. 

It is impossible to understand the undeniable 
vitality of primitive Christianity without un- 

168 



HAS THE CHUBCH COLLAPSED? 

derstanding something of the early world into 
which the Christian message was released. For 
the soil, as we know, is half the harvest, and 
unless we take this into consideration, we shall 
be at a loss to account for the shrinkage which, 
unless artificial helps are employed, must in- 
evitably ensue. 

It has been said that the year in which Jesus 
of Nazareth was born was a year of world-wide 
peace. The fact is significant simply because 
it is an exception. For centuries on each side 
of this little oasis stretches an interminable hu- 
man waste. The R6man state, which ever with 
unfailing pride traced its ancestry back to Mars, 
the war-god, was from its very beginning a 
military power. And by military power I mean 
not so much that it busied itself with wars as 
that these wars were the natural product of the 
tree upon which they grew. And if in this par- 
ticular year no fruit fell to the ground, and if 
Jesus of Nazareth slipped unnoticed into the 
quiet world, it by no means indicates that the 
character of Rome was changing or that her 
world-wide organization was in its decline. In- 
deed, we may truthfully say that up to that 
time her sword had only been sharpened, for 
it was afterward that Rome acquired that char- 

169 



THE WOELD STOEM AND BEYOND 

acter which has ever since been inseparably con- 
nected with her name. 

Yet to the seer capable of looking into the 
heart of things the hollow into which the So- 
man empire finally fell was already there. In 
every bosom was an emptiness, in every life a 
longing toward the horizon. It was into this 
vacuum, a universal yearning for the lost kind- 
ness of the world, that Jesus of Nazareth at last 
found His way and began His work. Nature 
has a way of restoring her equilibriums. A 
rise and a continued high temperature in sum- 
mer invariably brings about a reaction which 
cools the atmosphere. Similarly in the moral 
world a denial of all those divine-human quali- 
ties which are summed up in the word love is 
equally certain to bring about their affirmation. 
It is the sure operation of this great law of 
nature that makes it possible for men to smile 
in the flames of martyrdom, that gives to the 
despairing heart in the darkest of ages an ab- 
solute assurance of an eventual dawn. Jesus 
of Nazareth was the first faint flush upon the 
enormous Eoman night. If millions of slaves 
turned instinctively toward Him, it was a testi- 
mony not only to the character of Jesus, but also 
to the intense darkness which surrounded them. 

170 



HAS THE CHURCH COLLAPSED? 

Whether the day that then began has ever fully 
come or whether, if it does come, it will be a 
Christian day, are matters which for the pres- 
ent may be deferred. What we now seek is the 
meaning of that early message and the secret 
of its nndonbted power. 

If we understand heat, we need give little at- 
tention to the study of cold; if we know the 
dark, we also know the light. In like manner, 
if we understand the character of the Eoman 
state — shall we say also of the Roman people! 
— this knowledge will be of incalculable help to 
an understanding of Christianity, for the latter 
was a reaction against the former as a rain is 
a reaction against a drought. If we have 
watched the effect of a drought, the withering 
of the leaves, the dying of the grass, the lowing 
of the herds, we may shut our eyes and ears, 
when told that a rain has fallen, and know in- 
stinctively what has happened. 

The carpener of Nazareth was in every re- 
spect a complete antithesis of the Caesars, and 
that which He gave to the world is inherently 
as opposed to that which Rome gave to the 
world as one thing can be opposed to another. 
And Jesus Himself recognized this when He de- 
clared, ' * Render therefore unto Caesar the things 

171 



THE WOELD STOEM AND BEYOND 

which are Csesar's; and unto God the things 
that are God's." If this means anything, it 
means that the possession of those things which 
by nature belong to Caesar presupposes a loss 
of those things which by nature belong to God ; 
in other words, that Caesar is on one side and 
that God is on the opposite side. If the church 
has fallen upon evil days, the reason is not diffi- 
cult to find. Throughout the ages churchmen 
have tried to reconcile in theory and in practice 
these irreconcilables, to bridge a chasm that in 
its very nature is unbridgable and eternal. 
From the very beginning the church has found 
herself in the dilemma, Caesar or God, and she 
has held firmly to both horns. And holding thus 
fast to a contradiction, she has died. 

The Eoman empire was an empire of solid 
possessions, capable of being measured in 
square miles. And the armies that went forth 
from the golden mile-stone in the Forum had 
as their sole aim to add to these possessions, 
to conquer provinces, to increase the number 
of subjects, to swell the revenues of the state. 
And the marvelous system of laws which Eome 
devised was wrought out for the one purpose 
of holding these vast possessions together. In 
a word, from her feet of clay to her head of gold, 

172 



HAS THE CHURCH COLLAPSED? 

Eome was everywliere and always a material 
kingdom. That is why her whole spiritual life 
was a borrowed life. "While other nations were 
at prayer or were uttering sincere aspirations 
in marble statues, which is much the same thing, 
Rome, with equal fidelity to the admonitions 
of her heart, was practising arms in the Campus 
Martins or loosing her eagles to fly far over sea 
and land. If the Roman ever independently 
caught a gleam of the spiritual world, it was as 
the flash of a searchlight across the night, seen 
one moment, then forgotten. Coming in Roman 
history upon an aspiring soul like Marcus Aure- 
lius, who, though a Roman emperor, was by 
nature a full brother of the Nazarene, is like 
coming upon a crystal in an interminable ledge 
of granite. From the founding of the city to 
where she disappears under the deluge of the 
barbarians, Rome was essentially a denial of the 
spiritual world. 

It has been said by historians that much of 
the persecution which the early church suffered 
at the hands of the Caesars was due to the fact 
that the church already was active in politics and 
was furthering a movement for the overthrow 
of the Roman state. By which doubtless we are 
to understand that had the church kept out of 

173 



THE WOELD STOEM AND BEYOND » 

politics, she would not have been persecuted. 
We may infer from this that, in the opinion of 
these writers, there was nothing in Christianity 
as a religion to incur the enmity of the Caesars. 
Here again is that confusion of which I have 
spoken, that failure to perceive that not only 
in their outer activities, but in their essences, 
Christianity and Eomanism are opposites. And 
I use the word opposites here not at all in the 
loose sense in which it is sometimes employed 
when, for instance, it is said that a gas is the 
opposite of a solid. Under certain conditions 
a gas may become a solid, but it is evident to 
any one who knows anything at all of the na- 
ture of Christianity and Eomanism that in no 
circumstances can the one possibly become the 
other. The essence of the Eoman power was 
outer authority; that of the Christian is inner 
perception. And these two can no more exist 
together than you can force a man to do a thing 
and persuade him to do it at the same time. 
Jesus of Nazareth came to restore the lost kind- 
ness of the world, and to do this He was obliged 
to proceed in a fashion diametrically opposite 
to that in which the Caesars proceeded. The 
Caesars, as we know, surrounded themselves 
with all the paraphernalia of distinction, pal- 

174 



HAS THE CHURCH COLLAPSED? 

aces, guards, the purple, servile men ; for these, 
as is well known the world over, are indispensa- 
ble to marterial power. To compete with CsBsar 
in any of these things or, for that matter, to 
express the opinion that there were or ever 
had been poets or musicians greater than Caesar, 
was to put one's life in peril. And always the 
people were encouraged to deify their monarch, 
to look upon Caesar as God. And the more 
cruel, the more bestial he became, the more he 
was exalted to heaven. 

Jesus of Nazareth, on the other hand, not 
only set Himself resolutely against all this, but 
in the very nature of things He could not have 
done otherwise. For the sole purpose of all 
this is to beget fear, and fear is the opposite of 
love. And therefore He consistently put be- 
hind Him every temptation to distinguish Him- 
self in any way from the common man. For 
to encourage servility or to allow it would, as 
He knew, weaken His message by transferring 
its base to the outer world. So instead of es- 
tablishing Himself in a capital. He preferred to 
be a wanderer; instead of a palace, He chose 
rather to have not even a cottage; instead of 
guards. He would not allow even one sword to 
defend Him; instead of intercourse with the 

175 



THE WORLD STORM AND BEYOND 

miglity of earth, He associated with fishermen 
and with outcasts, to show doubtless that they 
were outcasts not from God, but from Caesar, 
and that there is absolutely nothing in outward 
poverty inconsistent with inner riches. 

Even in that thing in which He was ad- 
mittedly superior to those about Him, His good- 
ness, even in this He would permit no compari- 
son that would elevate Him. ''Why callest 
thou me good? There is none good but one, 
that is, God." And always when He speaks 
of Himself, it is as the son of man. Never does 
He arrogate to Himself that which He denies in 
quality to other men. The claim which the 
church has made and the emphasis which she 
has since laid upon the claim that Jesus is the 
son of God in a way wholly different from that 
in which an elder brother is, along with his 
younger brothers, a son of the same father, is 
Romanism pure and simple, and was undoubt- 
edly invented and has since been adroitly in- 
sisted upon for the same purpose as that for 
which a similar claim was made for the Cae- 
sars, to overawe and thus lay the foundation 
for outer authority. 

How degraded a thing humanity was in the 
ancient world is nowhere so pathetically exhib- 

176 



HAS THE CHURCH COLLAPSED? 

ited as in the attitude which Rome took toward 
the Christ. No point of contact that could pos- 
sibly be removed has been left between men 
and this teacher of men. All those splendid 
superstitions with which they had surrounded 
the birth of Romulus are draped round the crib 
of the man of Nazareth. As in the former case, 
the human father is gotten rid of to make room 
for Mars; in the latter the same thing is done 
to make room for Jehovah. That a human be- 
ing could be divine was to the Roman inconceiv- 
able. And in the Roman we can understand it. 
It is only the persistence of the idea to the pres- 
ent day that surprises us. Or, rather, it would 
surprise us were it not clear that almost from 
the first century the objective of the church also 
has been empire. 

The first span, then, in the bridge which ever 
since the church has been building between 
Christ and Caesar, is this denial of the humanity 
of Jesus. 

Among spiritual men, John, the beloved dis- 
ciple, has been generally recognized as the most 
perfect reflection of the Master. And his ob- 
scuration by Peter is, if we except only the cruci- 
fixion of Jesus, unquestionably the greatest 
tragedy of the early church. That a man of 

177 



THE WORLD STORM AND BEYOND 

such marked spiritual endowraents as tlie au- 
thor of the fourth gospel should have been rele- 
gated to Patmos while the building of the 
church, which was supposed to be a spiritual in- 
stitution, was committed to a man like Peter, 
is one of those incongruities of which the world 
is full and with which the human mind wrestles 
in vain. The giving of the keys to Peter is such 
a reflection upon the insight of Jesus that we 
are inclined to regard the whole story as a for- 
gery, like that other proved forgery, the Dona- 
tion of Constantine, on the basis of which the 
church laid claim to the throne of the empire. 
The imagination naturally pictures Peter in the 
Crusades. "With what fervor would he have ha- 
rangued the Council of Clermont! With what 
zeal would he have gone forth with Godfrey and 
Tancred! But Jesus of Nazareth would not 
have been at home in these violent movements. 
Nor can we conceive of John as anything but 
pained by this general drawing of the sword in 
the name of the Master. But Peter, as we know, 
well intentioned though he doutbless was, even 
in the Master's presence, instinctively lays his 
hand upon his hip. And it is of Peter, too, that 
the story is told how, forgetful of a similar 
weakness in his own nature and of Christ's gen- 

178 



HAS THE CHURCH COLLAPSED? 

tleness toward this failing, he struck Ananias 
and Sapphira dead for lying. That Peter 
should finally have gone to Rome, as tradition 
tells us he did, is not at all surprising. For by 
temperament he belongs there, just as Marcus 
Aurelius belongs among the disciples. And if 
the church was to be what it became, an organi- 
zation with world-wide ambitions such as kin- 
dled the brains of the Caesars, no one of the 
Apostles was so fitted to be its founder as was 
he. 

In the character of Peter we have the second 
span of the great bridge between the living word 
of Jesus and the pageantry of the Eternal City. 
Henceforth the spiritual kingdom was to be es- 
tablished upon material pillars; inner percep- 
tion was to give way to outer authority. 

If any one familiar with Roman history and 
the Roman character can read the New Testa- 
ment and not see that it would be utterly impos- 
sible for Christianity to conquer Rome, there is 
something seriously wrong with his psychology. 
And if any one thinks that Christianity ever 
did conquer Rome, he had better lay side by 
side the Sermon on the Mount and the history 
of the Dark Ages. "When the statement is made, 
as it is frequently made by historians, that 

179 



THE WORLD STORM AND BEYOND 

Christianity succeeded to the throne of the Cae- 
sars, it is obvious that the author is using the 
word Christianity not at all in the sense of a 
spiritual kingdom, but rather to express those 
outer characteristics which, owing to the trans- 
forming influence of the Roman organization, 
have since become known as Christianity. To 
mistake the church which rose on the ruins of the 
Roman empire for the church which the man of 
Nazareth established is proof positive of ethical 
and spiritual blindness. And to maintain, as 
some do who readily perceive the fallacy of this 
claim, that it is not possible to enter the spirit- 
ual kingdom except through a material organi- 
zation, indicates a myopia different from the 
former only in degree. 

But the time had now come when it was nec- 
essary to explain the new gospel to the wise, 
and for this purpose the conversion of Saul of 
Tarsus was most opportune, for Saul of Tarsus 
was a philosopher. He was more than that. 
By birth a Hebrew, by adoption a Roman, by 
education a lover of the Greeks, he was admira- 
bly equipped to translate into cosmopolitan 
terms the provincial gospel of the Nazarene. 
There are churchmen to-day who regard the 
apostle Paul as the father of modern Christian- 

180 



HAS THE CHURCH COLLAPSED? 

ity, and if we remember that it is for ''mod- 
ern" Christianity the claim is made, it must 
be conceded that their claim is not altogether un- 
founded. For who does not see that modem 
Christianity is a philosophy, that that thing 
which in the hands of Jesus was a religion, a 
thing to be lived, became in the hands of Paul 
a thing to be believed, a creed? Henceforth, in- 
stead of the clear perception of the spirit, there 
was to be substituted ratiocination; instead 
of conscience, there was to be intellect; instead 
of love and the unity of love, there was to be 
disputation and a calling of names. By intel- 
lectualizing primitive Christianity, by making 
abstruse and difficult of comprehension that sim- 
ple thing which the most childlike can under- 
stand, Paul opened the gates of controversy and 
casuistry. The church had now only to go 
straight on to come upon the sword that was 
waiting for her, and to enter upon that cam- 
paign against heresy which was to complete the 
monstrous perversion. 

What I say here of Paul and what I said be- 
fore of Peter is said with no intention of re- 
flecting upon the integrity of these men. The 
sacrifices which they underwent are sufficient to 
dispose of any doubt upon this point. Yet, as 

181 



THE WORLD STORM AND BEYOND 

we all know, if good intentions were all that are 
necessary, the world would be a very different 
place from what it is. Could the apostle Paul 
have foreseen the harvest of scholasticism, the 
dissensions, the confusion of what is fundamen- 
tal with what is adventitious, that were to spring 
up from his labored disquisitions, he would 
probably have gone about his work in another 
way. If we will only remember that philosophy 
is speculative and that religion is practical, it 
will become at once apparent how easy it is for 
religion to lose its vitality by being confounded 
with philosophy. When once this fog has set- 
tled down, it is then possible for churchmen to 
discuss such questions as baptism, transubstan- 
tiation, and the nature of God without perceiv- 
ing that they long ago left religion behind. 

How essential to the work begun by Peter was 
the work accomplished by Paul becomes clear 
when we consider the nature of authority. 
While truth remains cosmic, and its power over 
the individual is the result of inner perception, 
it is impossible to establish a central authority 
or even to diffuse this authority in an organiza- 
tion. For men who have truth in their own 
hearts or who realize that the perception of 
truth is a matter of spiritual unfolding, will 

182 



HAS THE CHUBCH COLLAPSED? 

never obey either a man or an organization. 
But once this cosmic character of tmth is ob- 
scured, once people are persuaded that the 
truth of religion can be arrived at only by rea- 
son, from that moment the training of the in- 
tellect becomes all important, and men are 
looked up to in proportion to their educational 
equipment. From this time on, especially to 
scholars, it becomes absurd that carpenters like 
Jesus and lens-grinders like Spinoza and shoe- 
makers like Jacob Boehme should know any- 
thing of the higher laws. 

With the impetus toward philosophy which 
Christianity received from the apostle Paul, the 
way was opened for the control of one man by 
another, of multitudes by a few. Church coun- 
cils became the order of the day. The ethical 
content of Christianity was scooped out. Doc- 
trine became more important than life. Not 
righteousness, but heresy, was henceforth the 
chief concern of the church. From this time 
on one has only to believe and to obey those 
who formulate the belief. The spiritual king- 
dom becomes identified with the church, and to 
enter into the one, a man has only to become a 
member of the other. 

Here is a Christianity, if by any stretch of 
183 



THE WORLD STORM AND BEYOND 

the imagination we may call it so, that the Ro- 
man will accept, for this is something he can 
use. Here is fresh blood for the decrepit limbs 
of the state, youthful energy with which to re- 
fill the exhausted channels of empire. Once 
more her legions may go forth, and the barbar- 
ians of the North, who for centuries have hurled 
their might against the empire of the Caesars 
until it is falling in fragments, will admit this 
new power into their hearts, though it is virtu- 
ally identical with that which they have driven 
from their fields. And thus Csesarism, which 
had gone down, will rise again and go forth in 
triumph not only to the Rhine and to the border 
of Scotland, but west and north to the ends of 
the earth. And for century on century the new 
empire will stand, established as it henceforth 
is in the human mind. 

This, then, is the third span in the great bridge 
between Christ and Caesar. 

But a fourth was to be built before the end. 
It was never quite enough for Caesar to be the 
head of the Roman organization and the giver 
of Roman law; he must surround himself with 
all those extravagances which only monarchs 
can afford and which seem to be essential to 
the control of millions of people. For the mil- 

184 



HAS THE CHURCH COLLAPSED! 

lions judge of power by the show it makes, and 
their obedience is lavish or scant as this out- 
ward display is prodigal or meager. And 
therefore it is a matter of prime importance for 
Caesar to establish himself in palaces, to wear 
robes of purple and gold, to environ himself 
with all those splendors that to the millions 
spell power. And upon entering into her Ro- 
man inheritance the church was not long in per- 
ceiving this. And forthwith she set zealously 
to work to supply this deficiency which the Naza- 
rene had overlooked, and stone by stone there 
began to rise that fourth and last span between 
Christ and Caesar. With an organization fash- 
ioned after the model of the Roman state, and 
a creed capable of serving all the purposes of 
the Roman law, she had now only to put on the 
robes of magnificence to complete the transfor- 
mation. 

There are those who still think that the art 
movement of the Renaissance was a Christian 
movement; and as proof of this they point to 
the fact that virtually the whole of the vast 
energy of this movement was spent in carving 
chalices, in painting madonnas, in building ca- 
thedrals. This position is of course untenable. 
The Renaissance was, as we know, a classical 

185 



THE WORLD STORM AND BEYOND 

revival, a spirit kindled at the ancient altars of 
Greece and Rome. And though the fire thus 
kindled was put at the service of the dignitaries 
of the church, the latter fact proves nothing as 
to the origin of the inspiration of the old mas- 
ters. With equal justice we might claim that 
modern art is a capitalistic movement because 
architects and painters are to-day frequently 
employed by the beneficiaries of capitalism. 
Michelangelo would probably have been as de- 
lighted to work for Pericles as he was to work 
for the pope. 

He who thinks that wine or bread or cups or 
altars or buildings are Christianity or any part 
of Christianity is, without knowing it, inside a 
. cathedral, and his ideas of Christianity are de- 
rived from the paraphernalia which he sees 
about him, and his conception of the man of 
Nazareth from the dead figure which hangs in 
the window. Art has a place of its own, and has 
nothing to gain from being confounded with re- 
ligion. On the other hand, religion has much 
to lose from being confounded with art. The 
purpose of art is to refine and ennoble the sen- 
timents, the purpose of religion to refine and 
ennoble conduct. Any confusion of these aims 
has a tendency to make religion theoretical; to 

186 



HAS THE CHURCH COLLAPSED? 

make unnecessary the transmutation of noble 
sentiments into deeds. 

With the rise of the Protestant Reformation, 
which was the expression of the Renaissance in 
the North, the world for the first time awakened 
to the fact that the church had undergone a 
radical transformation, and that the purpose of 
withholding the Bible from the people, as it had 
been withheld for centuries, was to prevent the 
change from becoming known. More and more 
clearly it was being seen that the church was 
in reality the Roman empire resurrected and 
wielding its authority not now solely from the 
Seven Hills, but also from the throne of the 
hereafter. The assault which then began under 
the leadership of Wycliffe, Huss, Luther, Cal- 
vin, and others, while carried on with a fervor 
worthy of the ancient prophets, had as its aim 
not the complete divorcement of Christianity 
and Caesarism, but the overthrow of the Roman 
organization, with its centralized, imperial au- 
thority. That organization itself, even without 
this centralized authority, was no part of Chris- 
tianity seems not to have been perceived, for on 
the ruins of the Roman church in the North rose 
organizations not utterly dissimilar. For cen- 
turies still the idea was to prevail that the spirit- 

187 



THE WOELD STORM AND BEYOND 

ual kingdom is not wholly spiritual, that inner 
perception must somehow be squared with outer 
authority. Naturally, therefore, the creed had 
to he maintained or the church as a material or- 
ganization would disappear. For it would then 
be possible for a man to become a Christian by 
practising the Sermon on the Mount, and not 
as now by accepting the Thirty-nine Articles or 
those other matters of profession which virtu- 
ally all the churches still insist are of divine 
origin. 

Is it any wonder that the tide has gone out 
and left the church utterly powerless ; that the 
whole vesture of Csesarism with which she over- 
awed the millions has been stripped off piece by 
piece ; that art has become art, still capable of 
arousing men to its defense; that philosophy 
has become philosophy, honorably installed in 
our educational system; that organization is 
still active in politics and industry; and that 
the church is nothing? Is it not a comment 
upon the hollowness of her pretensions that as 
civilization has advanced the church had re- 
ceded and that annually her remaining millions 
ooze away and are lost in secular affairs ? 

All this would be of little moment and would 
merit the unconcern with which it is popularly 

188 



HAS THE CHURCH COLLAPSED? 

regarded were there not a tremendously serious 
side to the matter. For nineteen centuries so- 
ciety has left in the hands of the church the di- 
rection of the moral forces of the world. And 
now, after all these centuries, we find ourselves 
falling into the same moral vacuum into which 
the Roman empire fell. After eighteen hundred 
years it is as easy for men to thrust bayonets 
into one another as it was in the heathen world. 
Is it not apparent that the church has collapsed? 



189 



THE COSMIC MEANING OF WOMAN 



VIII 

THE COSMIC MEANING OF WOMAN 

WHATEVER may have been hitherto our 
idea of '* woman's place," never again, 
or at least not until the present war has 
been forgotten, will it be possible seriously to 
state to a serious audience that the participa- 
tion of woman in the affairs of the world would 
work harm to society. Other arguments may 
survive, other fears may be played upon, but 
this one has received its death-blow. The in- 
jury which society was to receive at the hands 
of woman has been anticipated by the hands 
of man. Hereafter, when the probable loss to 
the world from the feminization of society is 
under debate, man at least will have noth- 
ing to say. And among women, those who in 
the past have suffered from this fear and have 
purposely shared their anxiety with others, will, 
if they are wise, devote that energy which they 
have heretofore expended in protecting society 
from woman, to protecting woman from society. 

193 



THE WOELD STOEM AND BEYOND 

For hencefortH assuredly it is society, not 
woman, that is the menace. In one night our 
solicitude has faced about. "What was it in 
woman that we feared? Was it the softening 
of our civilization ? Upon this score at least the 
war has reassured us. 

If ever there were reasons why woman should 
remain aloof from the world and develop in her 
own sphere what is called her "higher nature," 
to-day those reasons are multiplied by ten. 
And undoubtedly they will be seized upon. For 
the future, we may depend upon it, more than 
ever will the home be glorified. With vastly 
more weight than heretofore it will be urged 
that the refined nature of woman has no place 
in a world given over to savagery, that she has 
everything to lose and nothing to gain ; for what 
has such a society to give! Why, it will be 
asked, should woman bring her purity and vir- 
gin emotion to a world that has no appreciation 
of these things? Life that has suddenly be- 
come infinitely complex, the opponents of the 
world woman will meet more determinedly than 
ever before by a retreat from its responsibili- 
ties, by the plea that for woman the higher re- 
sponsibilities lie more than ever in the home. 

On the other hand, to millions of women who 
194 



THE COSMIC MEANING OF WOMAN 

heretofore have shown no interest either in 
feminism or in the franchise, but who have been 
content about their households, the present war 
has already come as the cry of a drowning man 
piercing the darkness of the night. As never 
before, the doorways of the world are filled with 
women, perplexed, silent, suffering, horrified, 
now looking toward Belgium and Poland and 
now barkening back in their rooms to the voices 
of children at play. Will it ever be possible 
again in any part of the world for a woman to 
bring forth a child and not question if her pains 
are worth while ? Never since the beginning of 
time has life's appalling contradiction so torn 
the heart of woman as it is tearing it to-day. 
To these undoubtedly it has become a serious 
problem, where the "higher responsibility" lies. 
And to this problem nothing less than life can 
give answer. Trained to harken the need of 
the home, what will she do now that the world is 
calling? Yesterday it was easy to think of the 
home and the world as distinct; easy for a 
woman to quiet her conscience with the thought 
of household duties well performed. To-day of 
how little consequence is it that the linen is clean 
and the rooms in order ! To-day the home and 
the world are one, caught up by the same storm 

195 



THE WORLD STORM AND BEYOND 

and blown together toward the same fate. 
Whatever may happen hereafter, never again 
will it be possible to think of man and woman 
as other than human beings meeting the comedy 
and tragedy of life hand in hand as one. 

And yet when we consider it less profoundly, 
when we allow only our eyes to rove over the 
event, when before was the threshold so con- 
spicuously the dividing line between man's 
world and woman's world? Suddenly over Eu- 
rope, as over a vast field with millions of hu- 
man beings at work and at play in the conscious- 
ness of a common humanity, a great Hand has 
come down upon the nations and separated the 
sexes, moving the male to the borders and leav- 
ing the female in the interiors. On one side of 
a chasm, rifted as by an earthquake and unfath- 
omable almost as life itself, are fathers and hus- 
bands and brothers ; on the other, mothers and 
wives and sisters. And but yesterday in the 
streets of the cities, in the fields of labor, in the 
places of merriment, man and woman were be- 
coming one. Their occupations were blending, 
their lives were coalescing and eliciting more 
and more respect and understanding. To-day, 
as at the stroke of a sword, they are two, cos- 
mically two, with vast seas between them. The 

196 



THE COSMIC MEANING OF Y/OMAN 

gradual knitting together of the ages is torn 
asunder. Like an old scar the sex line has re- 
appeared, and there is no sanctuary even in the 
home. From a being clothed yesterday with 
chivalry and touching woman's hand with rever- 
ence, man has suddenly dropped back into the 
jungle and is abroad about his ancient business 
of killing ; while, as in the early days of the race, 
woman is flying from the ravager, or is about 
the house tending her orphans, or in the fields 
wondering why, watching the horizon, anxious 
how the battle is going, or kneeling in the wake 
of the storm, binding up her wounded lord. 

It is particularly important just now when 
the mighty organism of life is being torn apart, 
to consider the respective natures of man and 
woman and the parts which obviously they were 
intended to play in the building of the world. 
For very clearly a mistake has been made. 
Very clearly, as in the days of Babel, something 
has happened that has brought inexplicable con- 
fusion upon the builders, and in the medley and 
the conflict centuries are falling down upon us. 
And in our search for the cause of this mistake 
we shall do well not hastily to dismiss, as some- 
thing that has no connection with the catas- 
trophe, the relation of man and woman. For 

197 



THE WORLD STORM AND BEYOND 

possibly it is here, covered up under the familiar 
common-places of life, and not, as we have im- 
agined, in the relation of Austria and Serbia or 
of Germany and England, that the real trouble 
lies. 

And apart from the gnawing hunger to know 
how it has come about that we plant only to 
burn, and build only to destroy, and bring forth 
only to put to the bayonet, no one with a bent for 
prophecy or with a natural human curiosity for 
what in the way of social changes to-morrow 
may have in store for us, can afford on the eve 
of such changes to give to woman a dismissing 
glance. For, dissected and weighed, carded and 
catalogued as she has been by the masters of 
science, and discussed, one would say, from 
every angle of the circle, woman remains, as her 
recent coming out into the world remains, the 
most potential phenomenon of the present time. 
What the white man, landing upon the shores of 
the New World, was to the Indian, that to the 
present age is woman. What is she, why is she 
crossing her ancient boundary, and what is her 
significance in the thick darkness that has come 
over us? These are questions to which no hu- 
man being, alive to the portentous events that 
storm about us, dare shut his ears. 

198 



THE COSMIC MEANING OF WOMAN 

The sex question, as one phase of the woman 
problem is sometimes called, I shall reserve for 
a subsequent chapter. In this one it is the femi- 
nine quality alone that concerns us, the spiritual 
difference — if there be such a difference — ^be- 
tween the male and the female, and the conclu- 
sions likely to affect the structure of future so- 
ciety that may fairly be drawn therefrom. 
That social revolutions of deep significance are 
upon us, there can be no question ; what they will 
be and what changes they will bring about de- 
pends very largely upon what in her deeper na- 
ture woman really is. 

There is a story far back in the annals of 
early Rome that I wish to take out of the dust 
that has gathered over it and lay upon this page, 
not only because of the light which, better than 
any other story I know of in history, it throws 
upon the real nature of man and woman, but 
also because of its application to the present 
crisis and beyond the present crisis to the social 
life of to-morrow. It is the well-known story of 
the Sabine women. For the benefit of those 
who have forgotten it, I relate it again. 

Shortly after the founding of Rome a festival 
was held to which the peoples of the neighbor- 
ing villages were invited. Toward the close of 

199 



THE WORLD STORM AND BEYOND 

this gala occasion tlie men of Rome, among 
whom there was a shortage of women, seized 
and made off with the daughters of the visiting 
peoples. As was to be expected, strife shortly 
afterwards ensued between the outraged vil- 
lagers and the new city upon the Tiber. In this 
warfare, the Sabines at first took no part. 
Later, however, they too attacked Rome. While 
the fortune of this later assault hung in the 
balance, the Romans at first being driven back 
and then the Sabines, the daughters of the lat- 
ter, who had now become the wives of the 
Romans, rushed in between the opposing forces 
and begged their fathers and brothers on the one 
hand and their husbands on the other to desist. 
Unable to withstand so touching an appeal, the 
warring peoples put aside their hatred and made 
peace. More than this, the Sabines and the 
Romans united and became one, their kings, 
Titus Tatius and Romulus, thereafter sharing 
equally in the government. 

Let us rid ourselves if we can of our famili- 
arity with those things with which we have 
grown up and if possible look at them with an 
eye, let us say, of a being that has just alighted 
upon the grass of this earth from the slopes of 
some neighboring planet. And going back in 

200 



THE COSMIC MEANING OF WOMAN 

time, let us take our stand on the top of the 
Capitoline Hill when the event we have just re- 
lated was taking place. 

The first thing that catches our attention is of 
course the conflict that is going on between 
groups of persons who are so alike in structure 
and appearance as to be indistinguishable. 
Presently we notice, hurrying out from the 
homes of the city and making their way in be- 
tween the combatants, another group of beings 
somewhat different from the others. Their ap- 
pearance is different and for some reason they 
are not in the conflict. And these outward dif- 
ferences, as we see when the new arrivals come 
between the warring factions, are matched by 
other differences equally conspicuous. For 
though they are now in the thick of the fray, 
they do not fight, but with voices and uplifted 
hands seek to put an end to the strife. 

Strange that beings of such marked resem- 
blance as those that fight and these that plead 
should seek their ends in such strikingly dissimi- 
lar fashion. And this strange phenomenon be- 
comes even stranger when we learn, as we do 
from the discussion which follows, that it is the 
long-haired ones, who have taken no part in the 
battle, that are the injured ones, the violation of 

201 



THE WOELD STOEM AND BEYOND 

whose rights has brought on the fury and the 
bloodshed. And yet, see them how, forgetful of 
themselves, they take the hands or cling about 
the necks of those who are still reluctant to 
yield. Clearly these are beings of a different 
sort, for the one is weak and the other is strong, 
and yet the weaker is stronger than the strong. 
For with a power born neither of arms nor of 
arguments, the newcomer from the homes of the 
city has turned war into peace and enmity into 
friendship. 

From what we have seen it is evident that the 
difference between these two beings goes deeper 
than dress, deeper than laws, deeper even than 
form. And we need not go far from Eome, we 
need but walk out into the fields about the city, 
where the herds and flocks are grazing or, fur- 
ther, into the wilderness where the taming hand 
of man has never been, to perceive that the dif- 
ference is a cosmic difference, that the same 
bellicose quality which we saw in the groups 
fighting upon the hillside is characteristic of the 
protector in every species whether human, beast, 
or bird, and that the gentler quality of the home- 
maker is likewise manifested upon every plane 
of nature. 

Into the causes of this difference it is not 
202 



THE COSMIC MEANING OF WOMAN 

necessary here to enter, for it is with the signifi- 
cance of the fact that we have here chiefly to do. 
Enough to know that whether we consider him 
far back in the cosmic light or in the fields of 
his more recent evolution, man is the representa- 
tive of what, for want of a better term, we may 
call the outer world. And woman, traveling a 
circle horizontally, shall we say, smaller than 
man's, is equally the representative of what we 
may call the inner world. 

Or looking at them from another angle, we 
see that from the very beginning man has been 
the conqueror. It was man that met the wild 
beast, chose to meet the wild beast, for the exer- 
cise of those qualities which for centuries had 
been developed in protecting the mother when 
helpless with her young. Here for a moment 
the two planets touch with a small one between 
them, then swing on round — the one, we may 
say, to the right ; the other, to the left : the one 
toward conquest for food, the other toward a 
gentler, less strenuous life, centering in her 
child. And traveling these two circles, through 
the ages, the one a conqueror, the other a con- 
server, the one a slayer or an enslaver of wild 
beasts and wild men and later of the forces of 
nature; the other, ministering always' to her 

203 



THE WORLD STORM AND BEYOND 

helpless infant and working intermittently witli 
those things the mastery of which required at 
her hands no bloodshed — clay for vessels and 
reeds for baskets and fibers or the skins of man- 
slain beasts for clothing — these two beings with 
the passing of the centuries grew naturally, in- 
evitably into what we have just seen them on the 
Capitoline Hill, into what essentially they re- 
main to-day. 

In a word, as far back as we can trace it, Life 
is manifesting itself more and more in two forms 
and is carefully gathering about these two 
forms such activities and occupations as will de- 
velop to the best advantage those qualities 
which she is persistently seeking to develop : in 
the male, power; in the female, love. 

Whatever conclusion with regard to the na- 
ture of man and woman science may have come 
to that darkens the splendor of this great truth, 
is as sure of oblivion to-morrow as mists are 
sure to be dissipated at the rising of the sun. 
Beside the so-called **facts" of science which 
too often are but side excursions in support of 
some preconceived notion of social policy rather 
than an extension of the main path toward 
truth, I lay the mighty fact of experience. Is 
there a man living, is there even a boy, who does 

204 



THE COSMIC MEANING OF WOMAN 

not know from what he has already learned of 
life, from what he has seen in his own home, 
that in this story of the Sabines, now more than 
twenty-five hundred years old, is revealed as 
through a magic glass the real nature of man 
and the real nature of woman? Is there any- 
where in the world a home in which the situation 
presented in this story has not at some time or 
other been duplicated; the males quarreling 
and the females intervening for peace? Or 
looking out of the window, or passing along the 
street of town or city, who has not come upon 
further proofs that man is primarily the em- 
bodiment of power and woman of love ? 

Here, then, we have issuing straight out of 
the cosmos an ultimate word upon the subject 
of the relation of man and woman in the world, 
a voice that goes through the woman question 
like a clearing wind. Have we heeded this 
voice ? Or in the building of civilization are we 
at work beyond the cosmos, and may therefore 
cosmic pronouncements be disregarded? That 
we have disregarded them and barkened rather 
to biology, concerned solely with the develop- 
ment of physical form, and to economics which 
has run between these mates the artificial line 
of loaf-winner and loaf-kneader, there can be 

205 



THE WORLD STORM AND BEYOND 

no doubt. **Let woman keep silence in the 
churclies," the order of the apostle to the Gen- 
tiles, has been adopted as a rule throughout so- 
ciety. And what has been the result? 

Not one thinker, probably not one man or 
woman of intelligence the world over, can be 
found who would not say offhand that the world 
needs something. The diiference of opinion 
among them is simply with regard to what that 
something is. Statesmen everywhere are look- 
ing into the loose places of the law. Teachers 
are considering what alterations should be made 
in the educational system. Even masters of in- 
dustry, who undoubtedly would profit most from 
the continuation of the existing order, are will- 
ing to meet half way the world clamor for a 
radical overhauling of the relations between 
Capital and Labor. From pole to pole, from 
the very springs of life, the agonizing cry goes 
up that civilization has failed, that humanity 
has lost its way. The deep realization of this 
that has been thrust into our hearts on the 
points of bayonets is the one clear gleam amid 
the universal darkness that has fallen. At last 
after centuries of word discussion and sword 
discussion, there has come over conflicting races 
and classes a divine unanimity. Henceforth we 

206 



THE COSMIC MEANING OF WOMAN 

are relieved of the necessity of debating the 
question whether there is really a need of any- 
thing and may hereafter concentrate our 
thoughts upon ascertaining what that something 
is. 

Probably the whole world would agree to this 
also, that if civilization has failed, it has failed 
because it has become inhuman ; the sanctity of 
life has disappeared. There are those who 
have known this for years, though apparently to 
the mass of men or rather, let us say, to the 
blind leaders of men, it has taken a world 
butchery to disclose it. In the present war we 
have on a universal scale a display of that slow 
but sure vengeance which we sometimes see 
working out in the case of a hard landlord who 
does not understand why he should provide fire- 
escapes for his tenants until one day he hears 
that fire has broken out and that his own family 
has perished. Within the past few months a 
look of horror has come over the faces of the 
powerful leaders of men as though what is hap- 
pening were something wholly unexpected, a re- 
versal of the enginery of civilization. Instead, 
as any one who has read even the newspapers 
during the past decade or so should be able at 
once to see, this universal butchery of men was 

207 



THE WORLD STORM AND BEYOND 

the inevitable next station on the main line 
exactly as the stockyards in Chicago, that 
slaughter house of the nation, is the culmination 
of the animal killing that was formerly diffused 
throughout the country. 

Let those who are appalled at this sudden con- 
centration of the business of murder look over 
the statistics of the unnecessary loss of life on 
the railroads and in the mines and workshops of 
the world. Let those whose hearts sink when 
they read of the thousands of families turned 
out of their homes by war, compare in this re- 
spect the record of the days of peace. In New 
York City alone every year that passes thou- 
sands of families are dispossessed by landlords, 
turned out under the elements to sit upon the 
sidewalk with the fragments of broken homes 
while the city unconcerned goes on about its 
daily business. And let those who find it diffi- 
cult to sleep at night because of visions of men, 
women, and children in destitution flying to- 
ward the cities of England from this sudden 
storm of savagery, let these good people read 
the story, the understory of the working classes 
of England itself during the prosperous years of 
peace that have suddenly come to an end and 
vomited their growing distress upon the world. 

208 



THE COSMIC MEANING OF WOMAN 

That which was hidden has been revealed. The 
disease that has been raging unattended in the 
vitals has all at once broken out upon the skin. 
Consequently, if we are shocked, it is not at the 
crimes but at the war-paint of humanity. 

Has it not become clear that the fundamental 
trouble with society is the separation of power 
from love, our willingness to give to power the 
utmost freedom in the building and control of 
industries and empires, and our refusal to allow 
the love-nature of woman any social expression? 

Follow it out into every branch of life and see 
if the metallic leaves of civilization are not what 
they are because they have withered for want of 
something that is more life-giving than power. 
On the one hand we see the world dehumanized 
for purposes of production, and man everywhere 
subordinated to things until it has become pos- 
sible for great cities in the course of their nor- 
mal life annually to turn thousands of their 
helpless men, women and children out upon the 
streets for no other cause than that for one 
reason or another they have not fitted into the 
iron machinery of production. On the other 
hand we see woman, the bringer forth of the 
child and therefore the representative of the hu- 
man quality and of the humanizing quality, if not 

209 



THE WORLD STORM AND BEYOND 

at present shut up within the home, at least shut 
out from the larger institutions of the world. 
Nothing in human psychology, in its social mani- 
festations, so fills one with astonishment as to 
see humanity, conscious of its lost condition, 
crying up the skies for love while with equal 
fervor the heart of woman is yearning for the 
world. Will mankind never perceive the rela- 
tion between these simultaneous aspirations'? 
It is as though the race were suffering from 
thirst and at the same time was doing every- 
thing in its power to keep all the oxygen on one 
side of the heavens and all the hydrogen on the 
other side. In things physical, however, no 
such blunder would be possible. 

Imagine woman in the dispossessing business ! 
Picture her, if you can, walking through her fac- 
tory where pale children are at work, and seeing 
only the machinery ! That Herr Krupp should 
manufacture cannon creates no feeling of unfit- 
ness. But when Herr Krupp suddenly dies and 
his business falls into the lap of his daughter 
Bertha, the incongruity is too great to be toler- 
ated. Immediately, not for business reasons 
but for moral reasons, a husband must be found 
to relieve the monstrous situation. 

Beyond any doubt that which is happening in 
210 



THE COSMIC MEANING OF WOMAN 

Europe to-day does indeed strike deeper tlian 
the relations of Austria and Serbia, deeper even 
tlian the dream of the early Czar for a port upon 
the open sea. It is nothing less than a cosmic 
struggle, a demonstration by the savagery of a 
war unequaled in history, of the incompetency 
of power alone and unaided to build anything 
that will endure. 

And where, during all these intervening years 
while in peace and in countless wars fathers and 
brothers have been grappling husbands and sons 
in mortal combat; where, during all these cen- 
turies, have been the Sabine women? Where 
are they now when the sum of all these conflicts 
is raging? And where, when the present strife 
is over and the remnants of the armies return to 
build out of the ruins of the past new institu- 
tions for the future, where then will woman 
be? 

I have said that this struggle is a cosmic 
struggle, a demonstration by Nature of the utter 
futility of the separation of power and love in 
the building of the world. Then perhaps Na- 
ture can answer these questions. Perhaps she 
is already answering them. Perhaps it is be- 
cause we are so intent upon the destroyer that 
we have overlooked the quiet work of the ulti- 

211 



THE WOELD STORM AND BEYOND 

mate conqueror, the restorer. It is well that we 
should pause and consider this. For if, caught 
by the clamor and the confusion, we contemplate 
simply what is happening along the borders and 
fail to see or dismiss as of slight importance 
what has already happened in the interiors of 
the warring nations, we shall be skipping a 
chapter in the evolution of humanity without 
which it is useless to go on. For when the war 
is over, does any one imagine that the bound- 
aries of the nations alone will be changed and 
not also the boundaries between the sexes ? The 
journals of the world are filled with the expan- 
sion of man, his sudden rushing from fields and 
factories to the new occupation of arms. Little 
is said of the expansion of woman, her sudden 
outpouring from the home to fill up the places 
left vacant by man. And yet of the two, who 
shall say that the effect of the latter will not be 
the farther reaching and the more enduring? 
Or will woman, having possessed herself of the 
enlarged areas of man's activities, and awake 
now as probably never before, willingly sur- 
render them on the return of her partner and be 
content thereafter in the narrower, quieter 
sphere of ''woman's place"? 

We may get some light upon the probable 
212 



THE COSMIC MEANING OF WOMAN 

effect upon woman of the present war by a 
glance at what happened to man after a period 
of similar disturbance. Did man, for instance, 
after his expansion during the Crusades, when 
he discovered a new, vast world of thought and 
action, did he upon his return to Europe shrink 
back into the contracted boundaries of his pre- 
vious life? On the contrary, under the inspira- 
tion of that great adventure, despite the long 
and desperate repressive efforts of church and 
state, we all know how the spirit of man broke 
through the Dark Ages and burst into the tre- 
mendous bloom of the Renaissance. 

It may be said that the Crusades were them- 
selves the result of the quickening of the spirit 
of man, whereas the present change is not of 
woman's seeking, and that therefore we need 
not expect a corresponding forward movement 
of the female. And there is doubtless some- 
thing to be said for this. On the other hand, 
had the crusaders been thrust toward Asia by 
forces beyond their control, it is inconceivable 
that the vision of a wider world which then 
dawned upon them would not have been followed 
by the opening of new life-channels and a con- 
sequent alteration of existing institutions. 
Furthermore, we must remember that it was left 

213 



THE WOELD STORM AND BEYOND 

to man's choice, after his return from Asia, 
whether he should go on along new paths that 
had opened up, whereas in the present case of 
woman the same necessity that forced her into 
the new domains will in all probability keep her 
there. For when the broken ranks of the male 
return to take up again the tools of labor, who 
but woman will fill those wide gaps? And fill- 
ing those wide gaps, bending her back beneath 
the crushing burden which the war will have 
laid upon her, will she not ask the question how 
it came there? And will she be satisfied with 
the answer and turn humbly to her labors ? 

What will happen in Europe to-morrow, so 
far as it bears upon the place of woman in the 
reconstruction that will surely follow, can per- 
haps be even more clearly foreshadowed if we 
will turn to a calamity, in its destructiveness at 
least comparable to the present war, that fell 
upon England in the latter part of the four- 
teenth century. I refer to the Black Death. 
Probably nothing in the whole history of the Is- 
land Kingdom contributed more to the break-up 
of serfdom than did this plague which so deci- 
mated the ranks of labor that those formerly 
bound to the soil either availed themselves of 
the calamity to flee to freedom elsewhere or, re- 

214 



THE COSMIC MEANING OF WOMAN 

maining upon the demesne, were out of sheer 
necessity relieved by the lord of the burden they 
had borne. 

Does any one imagine that a similar slaugh- 
ter can take place to-day and similar conse- 
quences not follow? For years Europe has 
seethed with the political, economic and marital 
unrest of woman. And now that Death is 
abroad opening thousands upon thousands of 
domestic doors and thrusting woman toward the 
outer world and freedom, is there any one who 
does not perceive that the end of another and 
far wider serfdom is at hand? There comes to 
mind more than one instance in the past how the 
common people, forbidden the sword by the 
upper classes, were gradually called upon by 
these upper classes in times of need, and how, 
having the responsibility of warfare laid upon 
them, they demanded and finally secured for 
themselves the full rights of citizenship. Now 
that the tool, the powerful weapon of the pres- 
ent, is passing in Europe into the hands of 
woman, long denied it, will not the right and 
privileges, a coequal control of the world, in- 
evitably follow? 

We get but half the meaning of the conflict if 
we do not see that the fall of every soldier upon 

215 



THE WORLD STORM AND BEYOND 

the borders drafts a woman into a man's place 
in the interior. Read the lists of the fallen as 
they lengthen out day by day into the millions, 
as they shadow forth into an unknown future, 
and high above the surges of steel in the fore- 
ground stands out the astounding fact that 
woman who hitherto has been master not even 
of her own home will presently find herself in 
possession of a continent. 

What an unlooked-for ally to the feminist ad- 
vance I It is as though, almost at the beginning 
of an attack upon the outworks of the state, the 
gates of the whole vast social structure were 
suddenly swung wide open. Nature has come 
upon man from behind, and while his attention 
is fixed upon superficial questions of victory and 
sovereignty, the substantial things of life are 
being appropriated in the rear. To-day, as al- 
ways, it is behind the show of power, in the quiet 
places of peaceful production that the ultimate 
issues are being determined. The great ques- 
tion of the present conflict is not what, when the 
war is over, the Allies will do with Germany or 
Germany with the Allies, but what woman will 
do with her opportunity. Thus far, of course, 
her overflow has been simply into the channels 
of labor, and there, willing or unwilling, as we 

216 



THE COSMIC MEANING OF WOMAN 

have seen, she will doubtless remain. But what 
then ? Will her unrest be allayed? Will she be 
content with her new tools, and settle down satis- 
fied with her new freedom? Or will she realize 
that the end is not yet, that to remain here is 
still to be a serf, that her opportunity for world 
service lies not so much in labor as in those 
higher spheres of control? WiU she under- 
stand that to give peace and justice to the world 
love must sit side by side with power, not only 
willing but able to intervene? Or in the inevi- 
table struggle to reach this high place, will she 
forget her great cosmic mission, to release into 
the world the waters of love, and hardened by 
the conflict become a second male, another unit 
of power to continue the ravages of the first? 
Will this homemaker of centuries lose her vision 
and forget that the divine purpose of her com- 
ing is to make of the world a home ? 



217 



POETOGAMY 



IX 

POE.TOGAMY 

WHETHER the now famous prophesy, 
published broadcast some three years 
ago and ascribed to Count Tolstoy, did really 
emanate from the great Eussian, that part of 
it which touches the altered relations of the 
sexes after the great war, which even then he 
saw beyond the horizon, is so in keeping with 
lines already visible and moving in that direc- 
tion that it is worth while considering what was 
meant by the word poetogamy there used to 
define the new relation. In what respect is this 
new relation to be different from that which 
obtains to-day and which we have grown to 
think is final? Is monogamy, that institution 
around which the centuries have flowed so ca- 
ressingly, to disappear? And is something 
that is neither polygamy nor polyandry to take 
its place ? And what is this strange thing whicH 
is somehow to come forth out of the war-torn 
fields of Europe, stimulated into vigorous life 

221 



THE WORLD STOEM AND BEYOND 

possibly by tlie tremendous out-thrust of woman 
into the ranks of the world? And when it ap- 
pears, how will it nestle into the life we now 
know? Will the home that is being broken up 
rise again? What is poetogamy? What are 
the forces that are crowding it into the fore- 
ground? And most of all, what does it mean 
in the evolution of humanity? 

There is nothing with which mankind high 
and low, rich and poor, intelligent and non-in- 
telligent, is so familiar, and nothing which it 
understands less, than the relation of man and 
woman. Here is something that preceded by 
interminable stretches of time the birth of the 
sciences and the arts, and yet how little do we 
know of that as compared to these. We have 
weighed the heavens, we have mapped the earth, 
we have dissected and given names to every 
part, almost every cell of the human body, yet 
not one man or woman can tell the real mean- 
ing of the difference between these two bodies. 
They are different, that is all; and we pass on 
as from something trivial to something impor- 
tant. We build sciences", we explore history, we 
light the lamps of philosophy in the temple of 
the soul, but no lamp is hung above the relation 
of the sexes. From childhood, from the begin- 

222 



POETOGAMT 

ning of time, we have pried and listened about 
that dark chamber, curious to know and under- 
stand, and throughout the centuries we have 
been waved away. We have been told that 
"sometime we shall know," and the to-morrows 
have passed into ages and still the generations 
come to linger about the unlifted veil as impene- 
trable as it was thousands of years ago. Mean- 
while, with what vast expenditure of thought 
and energy we have cleared away the debris 
of the past in order that a new world might 
rise! Old arts are changed and new arts are 
born. Even the gods of our fathers come down. 
In every hall and room and closet there is reno- 
vation and an enlargement of life — save in one. 
Sex is still the attic of the soul where the dust 
of ages accumulates and where the spiders 
weave and prey. 

Strange that society is afraid of light upon 
this subject and yet is not afraid to leave it in 
darkness. Is it not astonishing, would it not 
be astonishing even if we were less intelligent 
than we are, that a matter which touches so 
deeply the happiness and welfare of every hu- 
man being should all these centuries have lain 
neglected while the corners of the earth have 
been ransacked for some new element the dis- 

223 



THE WOELD STORM AND BEYOND 

covery of which is sure to be hailed as a mar- 
velous achievement? It is as though a tribe of 
savages, numbers of which were every day 
breaking their limbs and losing their lives be- 
cause of their ignorance of the law of gravita- 
tion, should hail as a mighty man and a human 
benefactor the discoverer of some new star. 
The law of sex attraction is the law of spiritual 
gravitation, the nature and operations of which 
we no more understand than moths understand 
the nature and working of a flame. 

Conceive of a society that is governed by a 
perfect state, with men and women working as 
perfect comrades in a perfect industrial sytem ; 
add to this a perfect church — so far as such a 
church could be perfect — filling to perfection the 
sphere which through the ages the church has set 
itself to fill. "We have left, still unprovided-for, 
to organize itself as best it may, the great realm 
of the cosmic relations between man and woman, 
a realm which means far more to them than the 
state in which they live. "What to the average 
man are the laws of legislatures compared to the 
mighty law here operative? Most of us pass 
from the cradle to the grave without realizing, 
so far as they affect our real lives, that such 
things as statutes exist. And yet to what pains 

224 



POETOGAMY 

have we not been by these enactments to inform 
the individual of his proper relation to his fel- 
lows. But this other, that runs through life like 
a live wire, from which thousands recoil with 
grief and tragedy, have we not, with almost 
equal pains, covered it up 1 In none of the rela- 
tions of life is the effort to get information met 
with such suspicion. And to suspicion is only 
too often added denunciation, even persecution. 
That life is clean and in the light of knowledge 
would remain so, seems never to have occurred 
to us. We would make it clean by ignorance. 

In this chapter I am going to try, in the light 
of history, to find out the reason for this hu- 
man perversity, this religious devotion to the 
petty facts of life and this obstinate neglect of 
the great matter of sex. And I shall try to 
show at what point this intimate thing between 
man and woman touches society and therefore 
justifies the stepping in of the state, and where 
it concerns solely the two whose lives have some- 
how by the cosmic urge been tossed into con- 
tact. 

Eemembering then that we are dealing with 
something that goes into the very heart of life, 
something that is coarse or refined, physical 
or spiritual, as the mind that is considering it 

225 



THE WOELD STORM AND BEYOND 

is coarse or refined, physical or spiritual, let 
us see if we cannot find out how it has come 
about that in an age of knowledge, when light 
is spreading into every corner of life, the an- 
cient darkness still hangs over the great king- 
dom of the sexes, while every day thousands 
of men and women find themselves hopelessly 
caught and their happiness oozing away between 
the church, the director of the conscience, on 
the one side, and the state, the guardian of the 
outer welfare of society, on the other, or in 
the web of critical public opinion that through 
the centuries has grown up between these two. 
Here then are the factors of the mighty prob- 
lem. Or let us put it in another way. The in- 
dividual is the prisoner at the bar, church and 
state are the prosecutors, and public opinion 
is the judge. And in every land under the sun 
not an hour passes day or night, yes, not even 
an hour in the night, that this heart-breaking 
trial is not going on. And those who appear 
and are forced to bare their lives and plead 
for release or for mercy are of every rank and 
condition of society. And into what tens of 
thousands do they run annually, these mismated 
or unmated men and women, in cities and towns, 
in every land, groping about in the fog, a con- 

226 



POETOGAMY 

slant stream of them coming of their own voli- 
tion or haled by the agents of society into the 
great court of human relations. And of what 
vaster throng are those others, proud or sen- 
sitive, who, feeling they cannot bear this sort 
of thing, humbly accept the crumbs of life and 
through years secretly nurse what they con- 
ceive to be an incurable grief because in their 
opinion the remedy is worse than the disease. 
And little wonder. For who is not familiar 
with the enforced vulgarity of the divorce court 
where men and women cannot part in friendship 
but where in order to correct a mistake, often 
of immaturity, one must prove the other a crim- 
inal. Add to these that other multitude, restive, 
defiant, and portentously increasing day by 
day, who scorn to accept marriage upon any 
such degrading conditions and who are equally 
unwilling to bow to the dictates of society in 
what they conceive to be a purely personal mat- 
ter ; who hold that provided there be no child it 
is no more the business of society to interfere in 
the relations of men and women, freely entered 
into, than it is its business to interfere in their 
choice of occupation or the clothes they wear. It 
is of course with this last class that we have es- 
pecially to do, the defiant ones who are neither 

227 



THE WORLD STORM AND BEYOND 

divorcees nor Magdalenes, but men and women 
who have taken their stand upon this matter 
as upon a great principle. For to these will 
openly rally, the very moment it is seen that 
their stand has become tenable, all those who, 
whether in marriage or out of marriage, have 
suffered from present laws or conventions, just 
as it always happens in revolutions when pub- 
lic sentiment shows the least sign of turning. 
And we may safely challenge any man who is 
in touch with life to-day to say that the heart 
of the world, especially the heart of woman, is 
not in suppressed rebellion under the paternal- 
ism of laws and conventions which have grown 
up about the sex relationship. From every 
quarter of the globe the demand is becoming 
insistent that the rights of the individual and 
of the state in this matter be redefined. 

There are few in this age of diffused knowl- 
edge who do not know that among every early 
people, no matter how high they may since have 
climbed toward a more tolerant and refined 
view of life, slavery was once an institution 
cherished and safe-guarded not only by the laws 
but also by the religion of the country. Pris- 
oners captured in war, unoffending people 
picked up as spoil by brigands in their pillaging 

228 



POETOGAMY 

expeditions, men whose misfortune it was to 
fall into debt to the wealthy classes, all these 
in those early ages flowed down into the slave 
pens of the world. And so far was this mon- 
strous interference with the rights of men from 
being considered tyrannical or wrong that it 
was never considered at all. It was part of 
the natural function of society, like the build- 
ing of houses or the eating of food. And the 
least sign of revolt or of serious discontent on 
the part of this wretched class was put down 
not simply as something that should not be tol- 
erated but as something preposterous, as 
though the hand should rise in rebellion against 
the head. In the opinion of its then guardians, 
society could not exist without this moral or- 
der, this Grod-appointed arrangement. Natu- 
rally, therefore, it was not slavery but the con- 
demnation of slavery that was opposed to or- 
der, and every suggestion of change, if it showed 
the least likelihood of weakening this salutary 
bond of society, was put down by public opinion 
with rebuke or ostracism, by the state with the 
hard hand of the law, by the church with a con- 
tinuation of the punishment in the hereafter. 
Such among every people was the fate of those 
who dared to stand for the right of individuals 

229 



THE WOELD STOEM AND BEYOND 

to do as they pleased in the matter of their 
labor. 

Passing now to a second institution which, 
upon the collapse in Europe of the main struc- 
ture of slavery, was able, like another cancer, 
to perpetuate itself through the centuries — ^I re- 
fer to the institution of orthodoxy — ^we have 
another wide field of operation over which in the 
general darkness then prevailing — the inevita- 
ble shadow of this institution — rolled another 
battle for human freedom. Here the contest 
is removed from the physical to the mental, for 
a new age has now come in which man is to be 
put to a second test that involves his finding his 
way out of another darkness. The issue is now 
the emancipation of the mind, the question 
whether man shall have the right to face life 
for himself and to work out his own personal 
problem in his own way or slavishly to obey 
a controlling paternalism. Upon the issue of 
that contest, as we now see it, depended that 
prime spiritual possession, the right to think 
in freedom, to experiment with life and to accept 
at the hands of life its corrections. Does any 
one doubt that the powerful forces then arrayed 
against the new freedom of thought were the 
same forces that had stood so obstinately and 

230 



POETOGAMY 

struck out so fiercely before against tlie free- 
dom of labor? Is there one intelligent man or 
woman wbo, because the wheel of power has 
now turned round and the churchman has suc- 
ceeded the statesman, and the missionaries of 
the Eoman faith have displaced on the battle 
line the soldiers of the Roman law, does not see 
that the power which at this time, to stamp out 
freedom of thought, filled Europe with every 
instrument of torture which himaan ingenuity 
could devise, is identically the same as that 
which centuries before set up at one time in 
the island of Sicily alone twenty thousand 
crosses upon which were nailed twenty thousand 
slaves who had dared to question the right of 
the established order to do as it pleased with 
the labor of men? 

The enforcement of orthodoxy was the su- 
preme crime of the church, as the enforcement 
of slavery was the supreme crime of the state. 
And in the perpetuation of these vicious tyran- 
nies each could always count upon the support 
of the other and, strange to say, upon the sup- 
port of society whose education they had taken 
care all the while to keep firmly in hand. Even 
after a few bold spirits had awakened and, ap- 
pealing to the higher instincts of men, were 

231 



THE WORLD STORM AND BEYOND 

seeking to compel these institutions to keep 
hands off the budding mind of humanity, the 
vast majority of the people of those Dark Ages, 
as we truly call them, were arrayed against 
their own freedom, denouncing as heretics and 
either burning or tearing to pieces or applaud- 
ing these monstrous crimes against the pioneers 
of the new freedom* 

With the abolition of slavery and orthodoxy 
has humanity completed its emancipation? We 
have seen how through the centuries the forces 
of a static world have gradually been driven 
from their control, first of man's body and then 
of his mind. Is there a third realm farther in 
toward the depths of the spirit, a seat of power 
in the unexplored shadows of life which man, 
if he would be free indeed, must discover and 
make his own? Is there another responsibility 
which as an individual he must take upon him- 
self as he marches on toward his goal? Un- 
doubtedly. There is no such thing as ultimate 
freedom. The progress of the individual will 
always encounter the resistance of the mass 
which will always regard his pushing forward 
as destructive. Finally, as the number of these 
forward-pushing individuals increases, there 
will come a time when, to those who have still 

232 



POETOGAMY 

not caught the new vision, society will seem to be 
breaking up. Then if humanity is wise it will 
insist upon a free and full discussion of that 
which is causing the unrest, in order that so- 
ciety may not, in its misunderstanding of the 
phenomenon, obstruct the march of humanity 
into a larger life. 

Centuries hence when mankind looks back 
upon the present age as we look back upon the 
ages that lie behind us, it will be seen that 
society at the close of the nineteenth and the 
opening of the twentieth century was in the 
throes of a third struggle for freedom in every 
respect as important to the forward movement 
of humanity as the two we have just considered 
which culminated in the establishment of free 
labor and free thought. 

The coming of woman into the outer life of the 
world which the last half century has witnessed 
is comparable as a social phenomenon to the 
birth of science in the Dark Ages. It would 
be easy to parallel the appearance of these two, 
to identify their transforming influences, and to 
show how in both cases the reaction of society 
was the same. There has been the same sus- 
picion, the same alarm, and the same sort of 
activity among institutionalists, the same op- 

23a 



THE WOELD STOEM AND BEYOND 

position to the entrance of woman into the af- 
fairs of the world as there was centuries ago to 
the coming of science. Already along the short 
path over which woman has thus far traveled 
toward freedom, there is the same martyrdom, 
softened, I started to say, by the humanities of 
the age, but nevertheless the same as that which 
from Eoger Bacon to Francisco Ferrer has 
marked the long road of science. 

And yet while the Social reaction has been the 
same, the revolution which science wrought is 
as different from that which woman has set in 
motion as the knowledge of radium is different 
from Madame Curie. Science is a cold white 
light; woman is a human being. Science is 
chiefly concerned with the fact; woman, with 
experience. Science may advance though the 
scientist keeps to his cloister, whereas to widen 
experience it is necessary for woman to come 
out into the world and into contact with other 
persons. It is evident, therefore, that the 
present revolution which is gathering in the 
wake of woman is to usher in not so much 
new systems of thought as new arrangements of 
life, a renaissance of human relations. In 
other words, the field which the pioneers of the 
present world-wide but as yet loosely organized 

234 



POETOGAMY 

movement have earnestly set themselves to pos- 
sess and clear, is generally the whole field of 
ethics and particularly that neglected section 
of it which through the centuries has become 
known as sex morality. 

We can get some idea of the magnitude of the 
task they have undertaken if we will only re- 
member that as yet we are not able even to de- 
fine sex morality. We are in practically the 
same position with regard to the work which 
we have to do as were the people of the twelfth 
century with regard to that which confronted 
them. There is even the same reluctance to go 
forward, the same fear of what may come, the 
same obstacles thrown in the way of investiga- 
tion as our forefathers encountered eight cen- 
turies ago in the first steps toward the scientific 
age. And therefore while intellectually we are 
grown up, in our knowledge of sex morality we 
are but little ahead of the shaggy, slant-browed 
creature who fled from his cave at the coming 
of the glacier. Stop the average man upon the 
street and ask him to tell you something of 
electricity and he will astonish you. Then ask 
him to tell you something of sex morality and 
he will astonish you again — ^by his ignorance. 
Or ask him to define for you the relation of the 

235 



THE WORLD STORM AND BEYOND 

individual to society in the matter of property, 
how far the individual may go in using or dis- 
posing of his private possessions, under what 
circumstances the state may interfere and the 
justification for such interference, and in ninety- 
nine cases out of a hundred he will show an in- 
timate understanding of these things. But 
touch upon the matter of sex relations ; ask him 
under what circumstances the state is justified 
in interfering in the relation of man and woman 
— ^justified, I mean, not legally hut morally — 
and he will he unahle to answer you or his 
answers, if you care to compare them, will he 
found to be essentially the same as those made 
centuries ago when the question concerned the 
right of a person to think his own way through 
life. When I say, therefore, that in respect of 
our understanding of sex morality we are still 
in the Dark Ages, I mean exactly what I say. 
The mind of the average man is as incapable 
of dealing intelligently with this subject as was 
that of the average man of centuries ago with 
the sciences then coming to light. Then, as we 
know, the subject of free thought was taboo as 
heretical and dangerous, was suppressed by 
both church and state for the *'good of society." 
So to-day for precisely the same reason, pre- 

236 



POETOGAMY 

cisely the same attitude is taken toward the 
discussion of sex morality. We have allowed 
the prurient and the vulgar-mindedj who them- 
selves are never controlled by these considera- 
tions, to prevent the spread of light over one 
of the most vital spiritual problems that can 
touch a human being, one which goes far deeper 
into his nature and there exercises an influence 
far more elevating or degrading than any matter 
of industry or politics can possibly exercise, one 
which takes hands upon the highest planes of 
life with religion. And in the midst of this 
lamentable confusion as to the right relation 
of the sexes, woman has burst upon the world ! 
If there was ever since the beginning of time 
an age so unprepared as the present for the 
coming of a new and mighty factor, I do not 
know when it was. It is almost as though the 
wheat of the world should push up through 
frozen ground and come to harvest when the 
fields were full of snow. From centuries of 
secluded association with father and brother, al- 
most in a day and with no increase of knowl- 
edge, woman has been tossed out upon the paths 
of men. If we had not been engrossed with 
other things the resultant intoxication might 
have been foreseen, and the inevitable straining 

237 



THE WORLD STORM AND BEYOND 

of the conventions provided for. But with not 
even a consciousness, it would seem, of the sig- 
nificance of this change, the very natures of 
man and woman have come into electrical con- 
tact, woman the seeker after experience, and 
man the protector of institutions. And not 
woman but man is at a loss to know what to do. 
Trained to expect woman to fill a place, he sees 
her flowing out into all places. Educated to 
regard her as a possession, he finds her becom- 
ing conscious of something beyond, likely to be- 
come the possession of others. From centuries 
as a wife, familiar as the commonest thing of 
the house, she has suddenly put on the garment 
of uncertainty, a companion to-day, a stranger 
to-morrow. Cling as we may to the pleasing 
fancy t)f a static relationship between man and 
woman, as in the long ago we clung to the simi- 
lar illusion of a static labor and a static thought, 
the very days tell us it cannot be. And yet de- 
spite the testimony even of our eyes and ears, 
we persist in our efforts to arrest and bring to 
a pause the inevitable change. We even shut 
our eyes in order to convince ourselves that 
our procedure is rational. Meanwhile, a being 
whose interest through the ages has been almost 
wholly a sex interest is pouring out into a 

238 



POETOGAMY 

world that knows nothing of sex, a world which 
man has laid out for the game of life in which 
there is nothing between him and the stake he 
desires. And in the grind of this astounding 
maladjustment, while we unconcernedly look 
on, thousands of lives annually are going to 
pieces. 

From the standpoint merely of social econ- 
omy and the elimination of human suffering, 
it is exceedingly unfortunate that science was 
not long ago encouraged to turn its attention 
to the study of man and woman and their cosmic 
relations, in order that we might have some- 
thing of the fundamental knowledge upon this 
subject which we have upon other subjects that 
science has touched. For the situation in which 
we now find ourselves is one that may well 
arouse social concern. As a makeshift to patch 
up the wreck of our neglect we have allowed a 
matter which should have been handled solely 
by education to slip by us into the courts. For 
want of teachers we have turned to policemen. 
Because we do not understand, we punish ; and 
heedless of the example of our forefathers 
whom we now honor for their liberation of the 
human mind, instead of insisting that sex moral- 
ity too belongs in the field of education, we sit 

239 



THE "WORLD STORM AND BEYOND 

by and allow the misalliances of men and women 
to be thrust into the category of crime. Knowl- 
edge is denied, and yet it is a penal offense 
to make a mistake. If the mistake has re- 
sulted in marriage, it can be corrected only by 
confessing a crime or by proving a crime. If 
it has not resulted in marriage, it is even worse. 
And when the courts have delivered their pro- 
nouncements, those who have come and those 
who have been brought are thereafter wiser 
only as to the provisions of the statutes. Mean- 
while other generations come on, stumbling in 
the same ancient darkness, and the farce goes 
on forever. 

Is there no way by which this criminal pro- 
cedure may be stopped and this whole matter 
be brought back to the basis of education? 
Have we so long accustomed ourselves to rely- 
ing upon the state to correct our blunders that 
we have forgotten that the spiritual forces prop- 
erly directed are themselves adequate, in fact 
that they alone are adequate to produce a 
poised, self-controlled human being? Have we 
forgotten, furthermore, that we have no more 
right to interfere with the free choice of a man 
and a woman in the matter of conduct, where 
this conduct does not actually interfere with 

240 



POETOGAMY 

the rights of others, than we have to interfere 
with the thoughts that two persons may choose 
to think f And this interference, let us remem- 
ber, must be actual, not imaginary; must be of 
a more tangible character than those subtle con- 
siderations which we call sensibilities. For if 
we admit as a principle of action that the con- 
duct of one person must square with the sensi- 
bilities of another person, we shall soon find 
ourselves falling into the same unreasonable in- 
tolerance as our forefathers showed centuries 
ago toward freedom of thought. It was because 
this freedom of thought shocked their sensibili- 
ties, not because it interfered with their rights, 
that they objected. Have we fought through 
two great battles for human freedom, and yet 
have no vision for the third? 

In the matter of labor, since man emerged 
from slavery, it has been a principle of law 
that two responsible persons may enter into a 
contract and such contract is everywhere rec- 
ognized as legal provided it does not interfere 
with the right of other persons to make a simi- 
lar contract. And later, if the parties to this 
contract in which no third party is involved, de- 
sire at any time to terminate their agreement, 
society has come to recognize it as a sacred obli- 

241 



THE WOELD STOEM AND BEYOND 

gation that this privilege be respected. The fact 
that other persons who have made similar con- 
tracts have no such desire has no bearing what- 
ever on the case. Furthermore, to enquire into 
the cause of this change of mind in the con- 
tracting parties is beyond the jurisdiction of 
the court. Compare this respectful and ra- 
tional attitude, in a matter which concerns 
merely dollars and cents, with the prying, offi- 
cious, vulgar curiosity when two persons who 
have entered into a marriage contract appear 
and ask to have the contract ended. If our 
fathers could return, ''Here," they would say, 
"is the Inquisition again." And undoubtedly 
in essential features there is a striking resem- 
blance. Compare again our rational procedure 
in business relations where we consider our ob- 
ligation fully discharged when we have provided 
opportunities for contract, and regard the fail- 
ure of persons to avail themselves of these op- 
portunities as something that concerns only 
themselves — compare with this our attitude to- 
ward those who do not come under the shelter of 
contract in the sex relations. In both cases, we 
have provided protection, but how vastly differ- 
ent our views of the relation of the individual to 
this protection. In the former case, it is op- 

242 



POETOGAMY 

tional ; in the latter, compulsory. In the one we 
seem to understand that we are dealing with 
men and women; in the other we proceed as 
though these same men and women had returned 
to the nursery. Therefore in business we have 
democracy ; in the sex relations, paternalism. 

For the child, we say, the helpless child. 
Here, certainly, we come upon solid ground, the 
only solid ground we have met. Beyond any 
question the child should be protected in some 
way; through the state if necessary. Society 
should see to it that the child is provided for. 
But what do we mean by providing for the child? 
Suppose the parents have not been married. 
What should the world do with this little crea- 
ture? What should be his relation to the other 
children of the world, the respectably born? In 
nothing has the Christian world come further 
from understanding Christianity than in its an- 
swers to these questions. Against every prin- 
ciple of Christianity it has branded and made 
outcasts of thousands of children. And 
through all these centuries it has sought to 
escape the just condemnation of its inhuman 
attitude by shifting the blame upon the parents. 
The child ought never to have been born under 
the circumstances. The fact that it has been 

243 



THE WORLD STORM AND BEYOND 

so bom, that it was so bom yesterday and will 
be so bom to-morrow, is never quite faced by 
the Christian world. It is of deeper concern, 
it would seem, and more in furtherance of re- 
ligion, to enforce conformity to the conventions 
on the part of the parents than to see to it that 
through a broad charity and right education a 
human place is made in the world for the child. 
It is often a source of profound astonishment to 
hear people, who in other respects show no par- 
ticular interest in the child, who ''when disci- 
pline demands it" have no hesitation in inflict- 
ing brutal punishment upon their own children, 
express themselves with fervor upon the right of 
the child to be ''properly born." To such peo- 
ple this phrase has but one meaning, that the 
parents have been legally married. A healthful 
environment, sufficiency of food, and opportu- 
nities for education, these are not embraced in 
the term. A bit of Phariseeism more genuine 
than this it would be hard to find. If the child 
suffers from being born outside of marriage, who 
does not see it is society that is to blame for it? 
Just as in an age, happily now past, society was 
responsible for the somewhat similar disad- 
vantages which the child suffered from having 

244 



POETOGAMY 

parents who were free-thinkers. Then, too, we 
remember, the blame was laid upon the parents. 

As regards both labor and thought, man has 
outgrown the nursery of institutional interfer- 
ence. He has earned and now maintains the 
right to make a mistake and to learn not from 
punishment laid upon him from outside but from 
the reaction of the mistake upon his own life. 
In these matters we have come to perceive that 
it is best both for the individual and for so- 
ciety to allow personal experience with its cer- 
tain rewards and its equally certain punish- 
ments the widest possible latitude. And in in- 
dustry and opinion we ease off the rougher re- 
actions which the stumbling man or woman may 
encounter not by arrests and imprisonments but 
by the saner way of kindling in the mind by edu- 
cation of a truer knowledge of life. 

The abolition of slavery did not mean that 
thereafter a man was to have no right to en- 
gage himself to another man upon whatsoever 
terms and conditions he saw fit, for a lifetime 
if he so desired. It simply meant that he was 
not thereafter to be compelled to do so. The 
abolition of orthodoxy did not mean that there- 
after a man was to be forbidden to cling to his 

245 



THE WOELD STOEM AND BEYOND 

creed if lie so desired, but simply that lie was 
not to be forced to do so against his desire. 

What then is poetogamy, this new institution 
touching the relation of man and woman which 
Tolstoy foresaw rising beyond the great war? 
Obviously the third step in human freedom, a 
widening of the privileges and the responsibili- 
ties of the individual. Does it involve the pass- 
ing of monogamy? Certainly not. Will it 
stamp out polygamy and polyandry? Again, 
certainly not. Poetogamy is simply respect for 
the right of others to do as they please in the 
matter of sex relations, the opening of the gate 
for law to step out and for education to step 
into this realm, precisely as we have seen, for 
a similar purpose, two other gates open in the 
past. The struggles for free labor and free 
thought were won by man. Is it too much to 
hope that the glory of the third victory will fall 
to woman? 



246 



THE CULTUEAL OBSESSION 



THE CTJLTUKAIj OBSESSION" 

THE historian of the future who dips back 
into the files of present-day newspapers 
seeking material for an adequate account of 
the Great War will find within the field that he 
must cover an element which the historian of 
no other war has had seriously to consider. 
Heretofore it has been sufficient to set forth the 
causes, progress, and consequences of a conflict 
as they worked themselves out along lines cen- 
tering in and branching out from three leading 
characters: the statesman who, with his eyes 
upon the boundaries and the fate of states, holds 
in his hand the tangled threads of diplomacy; 
the financier, or master of essentials shall we 
call him, who embodies in himself the difficult 
problem of immediate supplies and the future 
economic welfare of his country; and the gen- 
eral commanding the armies in the field. But 
already in the present conflict, owing to a new 
factor which for some time has slowly been 
edging its way toward world control, a fourth 

249 



THE WORLD STORM AND BEYOND 

figure has emerged and already has taken his 
place with the other three. And the task as- 
signed to this new-comer, if we may judge from 
the attention he has received, is quite as im- 
portant as those presided over by any of his 
colleagues. For since the conquest of human- 
ity by the newspapers and the consequent tap- 
ping of the sources of public opinion, a high 
judiciary has come into existence before which, 
willing or unwilling, nations are tried. And 
this public opinion, slowly educated to peace, 
has become such an avowed enemy to war that 
armed nations have found it necessary to create 
and maintain what amounts to a new branch of 
the military service which, for want of a better 
name, we may call the Corps of National Apolo- 
gists. Even nations engaged in defensive war- 
fare have been obliged to adopt this new type 
of military assistant whose duty it is to guard 
the moral commissariat of the armies or, to 
put it in another way, to stand between the 
world's conscience and the horrors of the battle- 
field, and, when the scales tip with an over- 
weight of what seems wanton carnage, to throw 
into the other side powerful phrases of justice 
and of right. Therefore the battle of brains 
that goes on from the peaceful interiors of the 

250 



THE CULTURAL OBSESSION 

warring nations, the charge and counter-charge 
of professors and litterateurs who at the first 
tap of the drum seem also to have been sum- 
moned to the colors and who, night and day, as 
though the fate of their countries depended upon 
them, hurry with their briefs into the great 
court of neutral opinion. 

It is strange when the nations engaged have 
been so little regardful of the world's opinion 
that such strenuous efforts should be made to 
capture the world's sympathy. Great works of 
literature are being left in tragic incomplete- 
ness, the advance of science is being halted, and 
in philosophy who knows what masterpieces are 
being lost, in order that the belligerent nations 
may not lack skilled advocates to justify the 
course they have adopted and forcibly to present 
to a public, too apt to overlook them, those other 
considerations which are of more importance 
than human life. There is not a loophole, not a 
crevice anywhere in the wall of the world's opin- 
ion, that offers the least opening to a wedge but 
some famous writer of fiction, some renowned 
psychologist or some essayist of reputation, is 
not there pleading for a chance to be heard. 
Even ancient friendships are dug up from the 
forgotten past and are made occasions of 

251 



THE WORLD STORM AND BEYOND 

lengthy epistles, obviously intended for a wider 
public, to show what an irreparable loss the 
world would suffer should the ''barbarian" win. 
It was not unforeseen by those who have 
watched with any understanding the develop- 
ment of Europe that in the event of a war be- 
tween the leading nations of that continent the 
word that would probably be most often requisi- 
tioned to designate the foe would be the word 
"barbarian." For always there is some word 
which, by a sort of subtle agreement, is ac- 
cepted among the nations as expressive of su- 
preme contempt. For centuries the word em- 
ployed for this purpose was the word "heathen" 
or "infidel." But since the decline of Chris- 
tianity and the falling away of millions from the 
church these words long ago ceased to rankle 
and have therefore of their own weight fallen 
into disuse. But with the rise of the school, 
an essentially pagan institution, to the position 
of supreme influence, a new ideal has arisen 
which has necessitated the finding of a new 
word, one as expressive of the utter lack of 
the essentials of the true civilization as was the 
former of the essentials of the true religion. 
If the school were an institution that had come 
into existence within recent times, like the press, 

252 



THE CULTURAL OBSESSION 

if culture were a magical growth of last night, 
it would have been much more difficult to find 
the precise word. But the school, like the 
church, is ancient of days and has a vocabulary 
mellow and adequate to the needs both of in- 
dividuals and of nations, and therefore almost 
instinctively there has leaped into the mouths 
of the Frenchman, the Englishman, and the Ger- 
man a word which has lain unused since the 
eclipse of Greece. Now that Europe has become 
pagan or, let us say, classical, after two thou- 
sand years of dormancy the word ''barbarian" 
wakes again into life and once more with terri- 
ble disdain is hurled now across the Ehine, now 
over into Russia, and now this way and that 
across the Channel. 

This, then, is the new element, this tumult in 
the interiors of the warring nations, the attack 
of one culture upon another, each claiming su- 
periority, that the future historian will have to 
deal with if he expects to hand on to after ages 
an adequate account of the Great "War. For 
beside columns devoted to field operations, to 
the killing and wounding of millions of men, to 
the devastation of lands and the pauperization 
of peoples, he will come upon other columns in 
which, like a battle in the clouds, for the benefit 

253 



THE WORLD STORM AND BEYOND 

of neutral nations this strange debate goes on 
over the relative merits of their respective cul- 
tures. 

It is a good thing that the war has again 
brought up this question of culture. Never was 
there a time more appropriate than the pres- 
ent to assess once for all its value and to as- 
certain what service it is rendering in the high 
place which it occupies. 

Few things that have come down to us out 
of the past need so much as does culture to be 
reexamined in the light of our new democracy. 
For ages it has played about the horizon of 
humanity, evoking wonder and reverence, at in- 
tervals during certain golden years becoming 
an almost tangible thing, then disappearing to 
play again about the horizon. And always that 
awe which it has inspired, like that which the 
pomp of the popes inspired in the hearts of the 
early Goths, fresh out of the wilderness, has won 
for those who professed it considerations which 
the mass of humanity has not enjoyed. The 
slave who could recite Euripides was, we re- 
member, set free, while his companions, in 
whose minds the divine fire had never kindled, 
were sent to the quarries. Other institutions 
have suffered the shocks of life, have even gone 

254 



THE CULTURAL OBSESSION 

down under the rising flood of democracy, but 
with no abatement of influence the aristocracy of 
culture has persisted through the ages. In re- 
spect of reverence which they have commanded 
the professors of culture have been more fortu- 
nate even than the professors of religion. In 
irreligious ages priests have been persecuted 
like ordinary men, whereas in dark ages the man 
of learning has retained his halo, brighter if 
anything for the darkness about him. And with 
the advancement of civilization his influence has 
increased. He has even fallen heir to preroga- 
tives formerly exercised exclusively by the man 
of God, so that to-day it is the man of culture, 
not as yesterday the man of religion, who is 
summoned by governments in times of great 
crisis to make plain to the outraged conscience 
of humanity those other considerations which 
are of more importance than human life. The 
scholar has become the father confessor of the 
nations. 

In the long ago a war was righteous or abhor- 
rent as it advanced or retarded the spread of 
so-caUed Christianity. Then, too, there were 
considerations of more importance than human 
life. Though the church, as I tried to show 
in a previous chapter, from her very establish- 

255 



THE WORLD STORM AND BEYOND 

ment upon the Tiber, turned lier face toward 
conquest, it was probably from Islam that 
Christianity received its ultimate impulse to 
take up the sword for the conversion of unbe- 
lievers; and to the sword the builders of the 
church soon added the faggot. Divergent in 
many points of faith and practice as these two 
creeds were, the Christian came finally to agree 
with the Mohammedan in this, that war was jus- 
tifiable, was even a high duty, provided its pur- 
pose was to carry to the benighted the saving 
grace of the true religion. The one essential 
difference between them was that there was 
more strife to protect the true faith from the 
heresy of free minds within Christendom than 
there was in the Mohammedan world. 

The culturist therefore had a precedent for 
adopting the professional attitude toward war. 
Though there are people to-day who are doubt- 
less irritated by his aloofness from the human 
cry in the present war, in this, too, we must 
remember, he is following an ancient precedent. 
Culture has succeeded religion, but professional- 
ism has remained. War to-day is righteous or 
abhorrent as it seems likely to advance or re- 
tard culture, not all culture but the true cul- 
ture. Religionists and culturists, so wide apart 

256 



THE CULTURAL OBSESSION 

in many things, are alike in this, that they have 
both suffered from the fatal tendency to exag- 
gerate the importance of their place in the 
economy of life. Withdrawn from the world of 
active affairs into a world of contemplation, 
and surrounded with the ancient illusion that 
they alone live in imperishable realities, they 
have induced a state of mind that sees in all 
the other manifestations of life both cosmic and 
social, roots and leaves the sole purpose of 
which from the foundation of the world has 
been to gather food for these particular blooms. 
And tending these blooms, they have uncon- 
sciously developed that professionalism which 
imagines that humanity was made for these 
things and not these things for humanity. 

What is this thing, then, to consider, which the 
neutral nations are asked to take their eyes 
from battle-fields where thousands of men are 
dying? Obviously it is something which the 
mass of mankind do not understand and of 
which dictionaries give no adequate definition. 
We are asked to accept it on faith. We are 
asked to quiet our compunctions and to believe 
that if only the cause of true culture is pro- 
moted, all is well. And if, still troubled, we 
persist in our determination to find out what 

257 



THE WOELD STOEM AND BEYOND 

this thing is, and search the records of 
Greece where it is supposed to have originated, 
still we are disappointed. The past throws 
no light upon why it is that culture has a 
place in the scales against human suffering. 
We are even more confused, less able to under- 
stand it than before. For while in Greece, too, 
culture was considered a thing of so divine a 
character as to justify the enslavement of one 
part of the population by the other, it was not 
until the leadership of Greece fell into the hands 
of the semi-barbarian Philip that designs for 
world conquest became rife. Never before this 
did it occur to the sane Greek to take up the 
sword in order to bring civilization to the 
barbarian. The Athenian mind, superior as 
it unquestionably was to its neighbors, was 
never soil to the strange idea of teaching the 
world. The Greek was too busy teaching him- 
self. And always in Greece when the need 
arose the guardians of culture were to be found 
in the ranks of the armies. At Marathon, we 
remember, the great -^schylus bared his im- 
mortal breast to the Persian spear. And Soc- 
rates fought shoulder to shoulder with ordi- 
nary men in the Macedonian wars. And 
Demosthenes, that terrible foe of the barbarian, 

258 



THE CULTURAL OBSESSION 

went fortli against this barbarian, sword in 
hand. Evidently modern culture is more 
precious than ancient culture or more likely to 
perish should its guardians fall. 

"We are asked to accept it on faith. "We are 
asked to believe that above the head of the 
average man there is something for which 
nevertheless the average man should be willing 
to die. Even by eminent rationalists, in the 
grasp of whose terrible logic the pillars of the 
church have come down because it was claimed 
they supported a transcendental kingdom, we 
are asked in our investigations into the respon- 
sibility for the present war to throw into the 
scales this thing which very clearly belongs 
in the same class of unseen values. That I 
call an unseen value the existence of which a 
man accepts from the mouth of another man 
without knowing in his own soul that it is true. 
Upon the pillars of the church which the cul- 
turists have brought down they have erected 
another kingdom for the scattering of whose 
blessings it is their bounden duty as in the days 
of Islam to assault with fire and sword and 
bring into subjection peoples into whose lives 
this wonderful light has never come. Culture 
is the new religion possessing all the sanctions 

259 



THE WORLD STORM AND BEYOND 

and employing for its spread all the instru- 
ments employed by the church in the Dark 
Ages — even to the crosses. 

Is it possible that Germany does not see 
what every nation can easily see if it will only 
take the trouble to look into its own depths, 
that not only in neighboring nations but in Ger- 
many also, despite her leadership in education, 
there are vast masses of people to whom this 
thing which her elite call culture is an unseen, 
certainly an unshared value! For no one 
would resent more quickly or with more fer- 
vor than the German professor the idea that 
culture is reading and writing and the ability 
to figure wages. 

Is the average German soldier, who has 
grown up in a country in which it is claimed the 
new culture has for years had its home, so dif- 
ferent from the soldiers of the opposing armies 
that he knows what is meant by this won- 
derful light beyond the pale of which men are 
"barbarians"! Do these men whose fore- 
fathers marched forth to the ends of the earth 
and fell by thousands about the Holy Sepulcher 
understand what for it is they have gone forth? 
Of old, as we see it now, those waves after long 
waves that rolled toward Asia from the fields 

260 



THE CULTURAL OBSESSION 

and towns of Europe were blown by the winds 
of fanaticism. Of the peasants and artisans 
who made up the bulk of those great armies, 
though inconspicuous under the banners of the 
Godfreys and the Barbarossas, not one in his 
normal condition could have given any reason 
for his ardor. Even churchmen to-day are 
ashamed of those militant outbursts of the true 
faith and would fain erase them from the pages 
of history. 

Since the last crusader returned beaten from 
Asia, what a change has come over the world! 
Since time began no other six centuries span a 
gulf so immeasurable. It is as though, with all 
the intervening lands dropped out, a bridge 
should have grown up between China and Ger- 
many. Despite the wars and the clash of baron 
with baron, how still that ancient world, how 
far off from the world of to-day thundering with 
engines and aflame and boiling with democracy. 
And yet when we consider it closely the trans- 
formation seems to be chiefly an outer one. 
Wide as the chasm is, the man on this side is 
not so very different from the man on the other 
side. For while it is true that the farther end 
of the bridge is engulfed in darkness, in the 
march of man over into the present Age of En- 

261 



THE WORLD STOEM AND BEYOND 

lightenment, as we call it, tlie great forces of the 
Dark Ages have not fallen behind. Names 
have changed, possibly motives also, but that 
which is deeper than either of these, the ca- 
pacity of man for illusions and his readiness to 
march in vast masses into incalculable suffering 
and death for something which he does not un- 
derstand — this has remained the same. Fun- 
damentally therefore, despite the marvelous ex- 
pansion of education, we are evidently still in 
the Dark Ages. For what is the Dark Ages 
if not a lack of understanding, a widespread 
darkness instead of a widespread light? 

And over this bridge into a changed but not a 
new world has come also the builder of illusions. 
Changed as the times are changed, but with 
power still to set millions in motion toward the 
horizon beyond which they seem to think some 
paradise awaits them, the user of magical 
words is still among us. As on the other side 
of the bridge humanity was told and unques- 
tioningly believed that there was something 
which, though they could not understand it, was 
vastly more important than work or rewards of 
work, for which it was their duty, their glory 
to give up all they were attached to, even their 
lives, so to-day. Though the soldiers of the 

262 



THE CULTURAL OBSESSION 

true culture understand as little of what is 
meant by this phrase as the soldiers of the true 
faith knew what was meant by that expression, 
it is under the same enchantment and with the 
same shout that they go forth to die. 

As out of the Dark Ages, we hear of the 
**duty to make war,'* not the duty to defend 
oneself but the duty to conquer others. And 
when the world asks why, the culturists tell us 
it is for the spread of the true culture. 

Christendom, as I have said, probably 
learned this strange gospel from the wild fol- 
lowers of the Prophet who, in their assault 
upon Europe, curving up now in the West and 
now in the East like the horns of the crescent, 
sought to convert with the sword the followers 
of the cross. For though even before Islam 
the Roman legions had swept Westward, never 
from Rome this mystical justification of war. 
The Romans were a practical people whose im- 
agination, though it might play with the ends of 
the earth, was never kindled into the white heat 
of frenzy. Tyrants often were the Caesars, but 
never fanatics. If they went forth sword in 
hand, it was with something in the other hand 
which, after almost two thousand years, man- 
kind concedes was of inestimable value. In the 

263 



THE WORLD STOEM AND BEYOND 

wake of the Roman armies followed the Roman 
peace, in those days of fierce tribal warfare a 
compensation shared alike by serf and noble, 
and understandable even by barbarians. And 
therefore it is not difficult to see why the con- 
quered peoples of the north soon enlisted in the 
Roman armies, for whether in Gaul or in Brit- 
ain the lowest man, challenged to explain his 
strange face-about to the Caesars, could point 
to order where disorder had reigned, to splen- 
did roads, to growing trade, to a tangible bet- 
terment of life under the Roman peace. But 
behind the zealous followers of the Prophet 
what sediment remained? Looking out over 
the vast lands which they conquered, we see 
far less substantial contributions to the com- 
mon good than those which the practical Rom- 
ans invariably left in subjugated lands. Even 
more true is this of the followers of the cross 
who in turn carried the tide of conquest over 
Asia. The Christians were in no sense the 
vanguards of a higher order of life. Indeed, 
of neither the Mohammedan nor the Christian 
was it the purpose or the hope to bring such 
benefits to conquered lands. Theirs was the 
mission to offer in return for indescribable suf- 
fering in this life an indefinable paradise in the 

264 



THE CULTURAL OBSESSION 

next. It is impossible to conceive of the 
Eoman as ever aflElicted with any such obsession, 
for the Roman, even the man in the ranks, al- 
ways somehow knew what he was about, and 
there was no intelligence however low to which 
he could not have explained himself. But of 
the other two, those militant faiths with their 
imagined superiority and their duty to teach 
the world, what other word so well expresses 
as the word obsession that utter loss of reason, 
that wild egomania, that passion to die if only 
the true faith might live, which drenched first 
Europe and then Asia with blood? 

When we contemplate Europe to-day, we do 
not see that wide difference between Germany 
and her neighbors which distinguished Rome 
from Gaul and early Britain. In the case of 
Rome, acquainted as she was with cities, with 
commerce, and with the arts, one could easily 
have foreseen that vast benefits would flow to 
the conquered northern peoples who knew noth- 
ing of these things. But in the case of Ger- 
many, it is not clear why the other civilizations 
of Europe should be obliged to take character 
after hers. Nothing is so alluring about 
Europe as its diversity of races working out 
their diversity of ideals. At the price of this, 

265 



THE WORLD STOEM AND BEYOND 

which we find in no other continent, even Ger- 
man culture, though it were all the Germans 
themselves claim for it, would come high. Yet 
there are those who would see in the dissemina- 
tion of this culture over the whole continent an 
ample return even for the ruin of the present 
war. Just so the followers of Gebel al Tarik 
and later the followers of the Lion Heart. 

It is incomprehensible that culture should 
ever have gone to religion for its sanctions. 
For culture, especially German culture, has 
never in other respects shown a disposition to 
follow the lead of Christianity either medieval 
or ancient. Indeed, in nothing has the aggres- 
sive Teutonic spirit shown itself more clearly or 
more admirably a pioneer in those things which 
concern the freedom of the human mind than in 
the bold way in which it has dissected this 
ancient faith and divested it of its superstitions. 
Nowhere, as I have said, have imaginary values 
come down with such a noise as they have in 
Germany. For German culturists to have 
adopted the thesis of Islam and of medieval 
Christianity that war is justifiable provided its 
purpose be to introduce among the peoples 
whom it has outraged a vision of some far up- 
lands of the spirit that have been revealed to 

266 



THE CULTURAL OBSESSION 

them alone, seems to those who have fed upon 
the world-thoughts of Goethe and Schiller to be 
a blighting of the fine flower of the German 
mind and strangely out of keeping with that 
character which should rule the world. If the 
world is to be ruled by one race it should be by 
that race which is the most capable of appreci- 
ating what the other races have accomplished. 
Life should move toward the broader, not the 
narrower; toward the cosmopolitan, not the pro- 
vincial. 

It is surprising that the keen German psy- 
chologist who, it has always been supposed, 
understands better than his confreres of other 
countries the workings of the human mind, has 
not perceived the incongruity of a cultural cru- 
sade in an age of democracy. Here is a failure 
more astonishing even than the failure of Ger- 
man diplomacy. For any one with the slightest 
knowledge of human nature and with only a 
newspaper acquaintance with modern Germany 
could have picked out for the leaders of the Ger- 
man Foreign Campaign Committee a dozen 
claims far more likely to win the world's sym- 
pathy than this claim of cultural superiority. 
Instinctively he would have said: "Here is 
your need of land for your growing population, 

267 



THE WORLD STORM AND BEYOND 

and the care you take, more than any other na- 
tion in Europe, of your people. These will ap- 
peal to humanity everywhere, especially in 
America." For unfortunately we are so made 
that our hearts go out to human need and human 
attention but shut themselves up at the least sign 
of domineering. It is exceedingly strange that 
a truth, obvious to the man in the street, should 
have escaped the German professor — even be- 
fore the present war. And now, after months 
of opportunity to observe effects in neutral 
lands, it is incomprehensible that it is still not 
seen. In the experimental sciences particularly 
Germany has won fame. In her laboratories 
theories have met facts and have been subjected 
to the test of facts. And yet after this long pro- 
tracted discussion and appeal to the neutral na- 
tions one has but to turn any day to the corre- 
spondence columns of the newspapers to dis- 
cover under German names boldly put down 
such expressions as would have gratified 
beyond words the heart of Treitschke, who 
quotes so approvingly: 

"Some day through the German nation, 
All the world will find salvation." 

Signed letters more amazing to the common 

268 



THE CULTUEAL OBSESSION 

man and of more interest to tlie student of hu- 
man nature have never appeared in print. 
Evidently it is still not apparent to the Ger- 
man people that egomania is not only out of 
date, but what is more to the point in their cam- 
paign for the world's good opinion, that it has 
failed utterly to produce results. If instead of 
being a human problem, a matter upon which 
may hang consequences of the most vital charac- 
ter, it had been a problem in chemistry having 
seriously to do with the perfecting of a dye or a 
drug, it is inconceivable that the German mind 
would not long ago have perceived what was the 
matter. 

If Germany has failed both in her diplomacy 
and in her more general understanding of hu- 
man nature it is solely for the reason that, 
despite her marvelous progress along other 
lines, she has still not emancipated herself from 
the medievalism of her universities in which, as 
always, human values are of secondary impor- 
tance and in which the idea seems still to persist 
that humanity is interested not in freedom but 
in culture. 



269 



JHE MOEAL FAILUEE OF 
*' EFFICIENCY" 



XI 

THE MORAL FAILUEE OF "eFFICIEKCY" 

IF the present war is making some men brutal, 
it is also making most men humble. We had 
become sure of ourselves — sure that at least our 
foundation was sound. "We had only to en- 
large our rooms and here and there to alter 
their arrangement for the growing needs of our 
spreading democracy to make of the world the 
comfortable place our hearts had desired. And 
therefore, while we were willing to change our 
institutions, we saw no need to change ourselves. 
Now, as though something had been thrust right 
up against our faces, we see that it is not so 
much a new government or a new church or 
a new industrial system that is needed, as a new 
and fervent idealism that will warm and shine 
through all these. Given new builders, and 
whatever changes are needed in our institutions 
will take care of themselves ; but new builders we 
must have. And more light, vastly more light ! 
Never was the spiritual sun so far off, never 

273 



THE WORLD STORM AND BEYOND 

were we so lost to the meaning of life. For in 
as many months, as many centuries have fallen 
out. Yesterday between ourselves and the 
Dark Ages lay the bright fields of the Renais- 
sance; to-day we shake hands with Peter the 
Hermit and Walter the Penniless. Incalculable 
as has been our loss of property and business, 
this cuts nothing like so deeply as our loss of 
pride. With what terrible mockery it comes 
back upon us now that only yesterday we were 
sending missionaries to the heathen. If we 
could only forget that! If only we could shut 
from our minds the memory of the complacency 
with which we surveyed history and laid out age 
on age the march of man. From the fifth to the 
eleventh century a. d. was the Dark Ages ; from 
the eleventh to the sixteenth was the Renais- 
sance; the present was the Age of Enlighten- 
ment. Ah, the bitterness of it all ! 

This is the right spirit in which to face the 
future, the only spirit that can justify a hope of 
something better. No one is so difficult to teach 
as the teacher no one so hard to draw onward as 
the one who thinks he is there. If the present 
war has seemed to set us back, it is chiefly be- 
cause of the immense vistas it has opened up. 
It is as though all our lives we had had our eyes 

274 



MORAL FAILURE OF ''EFFICIENCY" 

upon tlie eartli, and had suddenly looked up at 
the stars. For centuries we had compared our- 
selves with our fathers, to our vast advantage. 
Then there was a shock, and we found ourselves 
facing the future. What we had done was sud- 
denly thrown up against not what our fathers 
had done, but what we had not done, and we 
were overwhelmed. We are small, we are igno- 
rant, we are barbarous. We were exalted, and 
we are cast down. ' ' Except ye . . . become as 
little children, ye shall in no wise enter into the 
kingdom of heaven." War has made us chil- 
dren. Now we are ready to go forward. Or 
at least we are ready to look around us in 
humility and with open minds. And looking 
about us, we see, amid the utter wreck of all that 
we have and are, that our sole hope lies in the 
fuller unfoldment of humanity — unfoldment, 
education. For how without this shall we find 
our way out of the morass into which we have 
wandered? 

What is the supreme failure which we have 
made in this thing to which, nevertheless, we 
still look for the solution of the mighty problems 
that confront us? Undoubtedly this, that we 
have mistaken literacy for education. We have 
been satisfied if the people — I mean the great 

275 



THE WOELD STORM AND BEYOND 

mass of people — have learned to read and write. 
We have led them through the alphabet, then 
to make room for those crowding behind, we 
have shunted them out into trades and occupa- 
tions. And we have deceived ourselves into be- 
lieving that we were educating the people. If 
any one doubts that the least possible education 
consistent with national vanity has been the so- 
cial goal toward which, consciously or uncon- 
sciously, we have been drifting, let him stop 
and recall how much he has read in public prints 
and how much he hafe heard from public 
speakers of the reduction of illiteracy, and with 
what pride statistics have been quoted showing 
this happy '* spread of intelligence" among the 
people. And the naivete with which we accepted 
this as proof of the enlightenment of our age, 
and the reliance which we placed upon it not 
only to advance society, but to preserve peace — 
only within the past few months have we come 
to realize what children we were. State has 
vied with state and nation with nation for a high 
place upon this honor-roll. In their eagerness 
to get their populations out of ignorance they 
have resembled shepherds who have only to get 
their flocks into the fold to go home and sleep 
securely for the night. Once they have brought 

276 



MORAL FAILURE OF ''EFFICIENCY" 

their peoples safely into the corral of literacy, 
they have felt free to turn their attention else- 
where. The completion of the education of a 
state or a nation is its graduation from igno- 
rance to literacy. 

When society has conducted a man across this 
line we are confident that thereafter he can find 
his way alone. For he is now mature, a shaper 
of opinions, a free and sovereign part of the so- 
cial intelligence. Thereafter, if he is oppressed 
industrially, if he is misled by his rulers into 
imagining that it is to his interest to lay down 
his tools and take up the sword, he has only him- 
self to blame for it. It would be an unheard-of 
extravagance to pay further attention to a man 
who can read and write and do problems in 
arithmetic. We have discharged our high re- 
sponsibility when we have connected him with 
the newspapers. Ignorant, he was a menace to 
society; but educated to read the newspapers, 
he is a safe and dependable citizen, or, what is 
more to the point, an equipped and dependable 
workman. Literacy is the sop which our com- 
fortable society throws to democracy. And 
with this supplied, generously as the modem 
world has supplied it, we were safe from a re- 
crudescence of barbarism. 

277 



THE WOELD STORM AND BEYOND 

Nothing in the record of modern times will so 
excite the smile among peoples of centuries to 
come as the serious attention which we have 
paid to this rudiment of education and the little 
after-concern we have shown for anything be- 
yond it. They will be filled with wonder that 
this age, the most marvelous in many ways that 
has ever passed over the planet, among the first 
if not the very first in the richness of objective 
life, should ever have confounded with educa- 
tion, which means unfoldment, a makeshift, 
hurry-them-through process that contributes to 
nothing of the sort, and is indeed the very oppo- 
site of unfoldment. The astonishment which 
they will feel that minds capable of producing 
such masterpieces of science and mechanics as 
our age has produced could be capable of such 
blindness as we have shown in education will be 
similar to that which w^e now feel when we recall 
amid what sort of crude, religious concepts the 
old masters flourished. Despite the fact that 
the age in which they lived was honeycombed 
with churches, not to that age, we now see, was 
it given to look behind the trinkets of ritual. 
Similarly, despite our multiplicity of schools, 
turn where we will, there are evidences that 
we are mistaking the outer for the inner, 

278 



MORAL FAILURE OF ''EFFICIENCY^' 

the facts for the living forces of life. Reading 
and writing, a little mathematics, a little history, 
a little Kterature, ability to trace a few rivers 
and locate a few capitals, to distinguish between 
the veto and the pocket veto, to know a robin 
from a bluebird — we do not seem to be aware 
that this is the outer shell of education as ritual 
is the outer shell of religion. 

Within a few years, if our present zeal and 
the outpouring of public and private wealth con- 
tinue, the last illiterate will have crossed the 
line into safety. Will our work then be simply 
to see that there is no relapse? Will we then 
have accomplished our task? 

As we draw near this goal, there are signs 
that, with ignorance abolished, with the mental 
man put in order, we shall be at a loss to know 
what to do. Already we are growing restless 
lest with these educational necessities provided, 
the raison d'etre of our school system will have 
vanished. And we are turning hither and 
thither in exceeding perplexity to discover to 
what other uses this expensive system may be 
put. And while discussion goes on as to the ad- 
visability of adopting this or that innovation, 
there is one which we have already adopted : we 
have resolved to educate the hand. 

279 



THE WOELD STORM AND BEYOND 

There are evidences, I say, that out of a sheer 
we don't know what else to do with them, our 
schools are to be turned into workshops. Either 
because we do not see or because we are inca- 
pable of entering the mighty field of the moral- 
ities, where the finer urgings and the powerful 
restraints of life are bred, from one end of the 
world to the other we are shepherding the rising 
generation toward tools. And, as always, 
weighty reasons are at hand. Why should we 
teach our young solely to read and write, and 
neglect the mighty matter of work? Work, not 
reading and writing, is the normal function of 
the human being. All else is abnormal. Work 
is the language of humanity. Why not teach 
the child to speak that? It is by work that they 
will have to live. Why not prepare them to 
live? Therefore, sewing and cooking; there- 
fore, the making of boxes and the molding of 
bricks. We have lighted the candle of literacy ; 
now we are going to set it upon the bench in 
order that the workman may be an intelligent 
workman. At last our educators have found 
not, as in literacy a means to an end, but the end 
itself. 

It needs no seer to perceive that the goal to- 
ward which we are aiming is the goal of the 

280 



MORAL FAILURE OF '' EFFICIENCY '^ 

modern world, efficiency. To be capable of co- 
ordinating brain and band in tbe production of 
a piece of work, tbat and that alone is to be the 
new education. Literacy, despite our strenu- 
ous efforts to keep it alive, would seem to be the 
dying out of an ancient ideal for an intellectual 
humanity, the diffusion of a light, once concen- 
trated in a few suns and stars, over the be- 
nighted masses of men. Whether we may not 
eventually dispense with it altogether as a lux- 
ury remains to be seen. For work has come 
— ^work, the herald of a new age. And educa- 
tion, the purpose of which among the ancients 
was to connect man with the cosmos, to give him 
an understanding of the laws and purposes of 
life, is becoming ancillary to this physical giant 
that has come among us. More and more the 
value of the training which is offered in our 
schools is being estimated by how much it con- 
tributes to the new practical science of making 
good, of meeting one's fellow-man or fellow- 
woman in the factory and proving the better, 
whether at the bench or in the office. And this 
is accepted as quite the proper thing except by 
those who are still not convinced that the world 
is a factory or man solely a workman. 
"What is the larger meaning of the new age 
281 



THE WOBLD STOEM AND BEYOND 

tliat for years has been dawning, and into wliat 
sort of world, if we submit ourselves placidly to 
its guidance, will it at last usher us ? 

Undoubtedly it is a revolt against the past, 
the sacrifice of everything to the present. This 
is the key-note of the new age ; that, regardless 
of to-morrow, the day that is passing must be 
freighted to its full capacity. Therefore the 
newspaper, the voice of the present, has suc- 
ceeded the book; therefore the job has crowded 
out the integrities of life. No single idea — or 
shall we say unconscious conviction? — ^has be- 
come so conspicuously the fetish of the modern 
man as the idea that the present is to be seized 
at all costs. The relations of things and of 
people, of the man himself to the past and to the 
future, all these are of less concern than the 
particular thing upon which the eye is fixed. 
That he is completing something or, rather, 
adding to something upon which humanity has 
been working since the very appearance of 
humanity upon the planet has either become a 
myth or, despite his education, has never so 
much as entered his mind. Such a conception 
is not involved in the meaning of literacy, 
is not necessary to manual efficiency. To be 
literate, one need not see his place upon the 

282 



MOEAL FAILURE OF ''EFFICIENCY" 

great reef of being, but only bis relation to 
the passing moment. As for tbe future, wbat 
is tbe future 1 We neitber know nor care. Tbe 
consumption of children in our industries is tbe 
index of tbe age. If only we can keep up steam, 
— wbitber we are plunging we do not care, — it 
matters notbing if we bum masts and cabins. 
Tbe past and tbe future are follies tbat tbe 
modern man bas outgrown. 

It is bigb time we were considering wbat is 
meant by efficiency, and just wbat tbe pursuit of 
it involves. It is only witbin recent years tbat 
tbe word bas become tbe common possession of 
men ; but tbis very fact tbat it bas tbus suddenly 
leaped into wide currency is itself proof tbat 
even before its coming we were already in full 
motion toward tbat wbich it signifies. Indeed, 
few words fit so intimately into our every-day 
life or express so precisely tbe spirit of tbe pres- 
ent age. To be efficient in tbe sense in wbicb 
tbe word is used to-day requires tbe concentra- 
tion upon some particular tbing or task in life 
until one's mastery of it is supreme. Is effi- 
ciency education? It all depends upon wbat we 
mean by education. If education is unf oldment, 
tben efficiency is not education. Education is 
inclusive, wbereas efficiency is exclusive. Effi- 

283 



THE WOELD STOEM AND BEYOND 

ciency has to do with a part of the universe; 
education with the whole. Efficiency produces 
a workman ; education, a human being. Educa- 
tion is illuminating; efficiency is the darkening 
of the chamber of life in order to develop a 
fihn. 

Does it make any difference, so far as its effect 
upon the person in the dark room is concerned, 
whether the picture to be developed is the pic- 
ture of a perfect mason able to lay a score more 
bricks than his fellows or a scholar who through 
years of application has added Assyrian to his 
list? Is not the whole question of the value of 
such efficiency both to the individual and to so- 
ciety the question how much of what lies outside 
the dark room has been forgotten by the person 
at work on the inside? Or is it of no conse- 
quence that stars are forgotten, that the open 
fields disappear, that parenthood becomes a 
name? Is an increase in such skill or such 
knowledge of such importance that we may 
safely purchase it at the price of the eternal 
verities ? That is a question which our leaders 
of education would do well to take with them 
into their studies. For to-morrow, as never be- 
fore, the world is going to put the question. As 
never before we are going to set ourselves to 

284 



MOEAL FAILUEE OF ''EFFICIENCY" 

finding out why it is that in an age of general 
education human life has no meaning. 

We are fortunate in having a single nation to 
which we may turn and find an example of what 
modem education, when carried to its logical 
conclusion, will accomplish. Germany alone 
has had the courage to build its last story, to be 
loyal to it unto death. To be supremely effi- 
cient both as an individual and as a nation, if 
there is one idea which more than any other de- 
serves the label ''Made in Germany," it is this. 
No other nation has ever rallied with such fervor 
about a word as Germany has rallied to the word 
Kultur, efficiency. Other faiths and philoso- 
phies have been thrust aside to make room for 
this. Kultur is the spiritual kaiser of the Ger- 
man nation. 

The world is under obligations to Germany 
for this energizing idea, which, in its place as 
the servant of life, has undoubtedly been fruit- 
ful of vast good. But as the goal of effort, as 
the master of life, into what moral confusion, 
into what unspeakable crime, has it not led us ! 
For centuries mankind will be clothed with 
shame, and the European, whether in the 
councils of state or traveling among the nations, 
will grow red and stammer his apologies. And 
.285 



THE WOELD STOEM AND BEYOND 

the German people, led on througli the years to 
this terrible chasm, when at last they have awak- 
ened, with what hearts will they face their mas- 
ters of education? How, hereafter, will they 
read over the amazing creed which to-day they 
so fervently approve and which through years 
has been wrought out of the basest utterances 
of their nobler men and the least noble utter- 
ances of their basest. **War is a business, di- 
vine in itself, and as needful and necessary to 
the world as eating and drinking, ' ' said Luther. 
"Let your labor be fighting. . . . The weak and 
the blotched must perish from the earth," de- 
clared Nietzsche. ''War is elevating. . . . 
What a perversion of morality to wish to abolish 
heroism among men!" said Treitschke. ''The 
inevitableness, the idealism, and the blessing of 
war, as an indispensable and stimulating law of 
development, must be repeatedly emphasized," 
said Bernhardi. Here, certainly, is the dark 
room. We hear of the failure of the German 
this and of the German that, but it is becoming 
clearer every day that it is the German mind 
that has failed. That is the supreme, the sad- 
dest tragedy of the present war. "We wanted 
it," says the great Berlin editor, Maxmillian 
Harden. And there is no doubt that he is right. 

286 



MORAL FAILURE OF ''EFFICIENCY" 

And only yesterday we were all at school to 
Germany. Our leaders of industry, our educa- 
tors, even our doctors of divinity, were going 
abroad to get the German point of view. Ger- 
many was the modem world; Berlin, the gate 
to the future. To be unacquainted with German 
thought was almost to be medieval. We did not 
question the relation between mind and morals. 
If the one had advanced, how could the other 
have lagged behind? How could a people so far 
ahead in theory be behind in practice ? We were 
ready to look askance at the kaiser ; but the Ger- 
man people — ^their sociability was one of the at- 
tractions of Europe. Their love of children had 
gone throughout the world with their toys. We 
were not aware that this sociability was subtly 
being fed to conquest, that these toy-makers 
were being converted into gun-makers. We did 
not realize the power of education utterly to 
transform a people. 

It needs no Treitschke now to tell us that ''the 
German army constitutes a peculiar and neces- 
sary continuation of the scholastic system." 
Assuredly it is. What the mind conceives the 
hand will execute. Given the German training, 
the present war was as inevitable as that a stone 
which had dropped four feet will drop the fifth, 

287 



THE WOELD STOEM AND BEYOND 

if there be a fifth. It was just as certain as 
that the stars swing round that sooner or later 
Germany would seek to complete her natural 
orbit. Whether Germany counseled the Aus- 
trian stroke that was the technical cause of the 
present war is beside the point. The great fact 
which sooner or later will emerge from the pres- 
ent confusion, which indeed has already 
emerged, is that what is happening in Europe 
to-day is the logical outcome of a partial, and 
therefore false, view of life, the inevitable con- 
sequence of the worship of efficiency. With 
the finest educational system of its kind in the 
world, with a system that in its way has made 
good as no other system has made good, Ger- 
many is less able to get along with her neighbors 
than any other nation in the world. 

Turn now from German militarism, the final 
step in German education, to industrialism in 
almost any of the leading nations. 

I have said that the world has become a fac- 
tory. Consider life in any quarter of the globe, 
and mark in what direction it is moving. For 
the vast web of injustice and poverty that we 
are weaving, our mighty energies are flowing 
into the factory as to an ultimate heart. And 
this heart is the active center of the modern 

288 



MOEAL FAILURE OF ''EFFICIENCY" 

world, as the school, in the higher meaning of 
that term, was the center of the Hellenic world, 
as the church was the center of the medieval 
world. And just as these former ages took 
color and character from their central institu- 
tions, so the present age takes color and char- 
acter from the factory. The statesman is the 
voice of the factory in government. The edu- 
cator never forgets for what it is his work is 
a preparation, that the final examinations are 
held in the factory. Even religion makes terms 
with the factory, softens its admonitions to the 
powerful presence in the pews. As the Greek 
was kindled with culture and the Christian with 
faith, so to much the same fervor the present 
age is bitten with the passion for making things. 
We consume ourselves in order to produce 
something. We cannot ripen, because it is a 
waste of time hanging upon the bough. 

The consequences are inevitable. The mo- 
ment a man becomes merely a workman, whether 
a miner or an engineer, a teacher or a lawyer, 
that moment he becomes less than a human be- 
ing. For no man can give himself mind and 
soul to a part without sooner or later becoming 
a part. He will fail to realize the difference be- 
tween a whole made up of wholes like society, in 

289 



THE WORLD STORM AND BEYOND 

which it is necessary for the individual to realize 
what he is, and a whole made up of parts like a 
piece of mechanism. In this respect the work- 
man and the soldier are alike. Each is a unit of 
labor, and it needs no transformation of mind to 
convert the one into the other. That is why it 
is so easy to fill armies with workmen. Both 
have forgotten or, though they may have gone 
through our schools, have never yet learned that 
they are human beings. Unless a mighty cor- 
rective is applied, a corrective which has not 
yet appeared in the modern world, the three 
hundred men who combine their labor and in- 
telligence to the making of a watch will forget 
that they themselves are not parts of a larger 
watch to be wound up by some outside hand and 
to be carried in the pocket of some kaiser. And 
once this oblivion has come over them, there is 
no limit to their loyalty, no sacrifice that they 
will not make to remain parts. 

To such a degree has this system, which we 
may fairly call the German system, become the 
European system and the American system, and 
is threatening to become the Turkish system and 
the Chinese system, that the integrities of life 
are on the point of disappearing. That free- 
dom of life, that space in which to wander, to 

290 



MORAL FAILURE OF ''EFFICIENCY" 

run, if one so desires or to lie down, that leisure 
to absorb the meaning of the whole, which is the 
divine heritage and joy of a cosmic being, is tot- 
tering under the transformation of the human 
being himself. The richness of color and of 
mood which we think of as the glory of the an- 
cient world is fading into the drab of efficiency. 
Gradually we are becoming units of labor. 

This, then, is the debris of an educational sys- 
tem that has utterly failed — failed to give sanity 
to life, failed even to protect life. For already 
it has become evident that if onr superstructure 
has collapsed, the ultimate cause lies down here 
in the foundation which, more from a hope of 
what it shaU be, we call education. The tower- 
ing structure which we reared, and which has 
now toppled over, was both in height and 
weight whoUy out of proportion to the labor ex- 
pended underneath it. That, we may safely 
say, will be the judgment of posterity upon the 
present age ; that it had height without depth, a 
marvelous mounting of the visible without the 
granite of the invisible to sustain it. Indeed, 
that is already our own judgment. 

Right here, if we only knew it, is the crossing 
of the two roads, from a far journey along one 
of which we now reel back stricken, bereft, horri- 

291 



THE WORLD STOBM AND BEYOND 

fied. Where have we been? Into what night- 
mare have we wandered? It is almost as 
though the body of humanity lay torn and bleed- 
ing at our feet, crying out in agony at the blood 
upon our hands. I have tried elsewhere to 
show that we have not leaped a sudden-yawning 
chasm into the present war, but that it was the 
natural development of our present system of 
life as truly as a fruit is the natural develop- 
ment of a blossom. Militarism is the militant 
factory. The factory — ^by factory I mean of 
course our whole industrial system — is our edu- 
cational system at work. These are the three 
cars in the train of the modem world. All are 
coupled together, rushing on together at the 
same speed, with militarism in front, the factory 
in the middle, and our educational system as the 
engine pushing them on from behind. Is there 
one intelligent person who does not see that the 
present catastrophe is the wreck not of the first 
car only, but of the whole train? To-day we 
sicken at the trenches and would fain forget the 
work of our hands. To-morrow we will dis- 
cover the second wreck, and the next day the 
third. Then possibly, in the light of this tre- 
mendous syllogism which spells out the utter 
failure of our civilization, we shall come upon 

292 



MORAL FAILURE OF "EFFICIENCY'* 

the cause of it all, that for the sake of speed and 
more speed and still more speed we have thrown 
into the furnace not only the coal of life, but the 
landscape, even the engineer. For that is pre- 
cisely what we have done, and the present war 
is only the horrible message spelled out in 
blood: for efficiency we have neglected charac- 
ter, for the almighty dollar we are destroying 
man. 

What, then, is oar duty in the light of these 
facts? First, to quash the indictment against 
the kaiser and against Germany (and, if our 
German brothers say so, against England and 
Russia) and against militarism and against our 
** barbarous industrial system," and accept 
service on ourselves as the builders of an educa- 
tional system that is a splendid success if the 
world is a factory, but a monstrous failure if it 
should happen to be more than that. Then, hav- 
ing taken this step, without which no progress is 
possible, we are back at the cross-roads whence 
the second path leads up over the mountains. 
We are facing away from industry toward life, 
and are ready to march on from literacy to edu- 
cation, from information to unfoldment. Our 
eyes are open to the place of work and to the 
place of the moralities. We are ready to ad- 

293 



THE WORLD STORM AND BEYOND 

mit that to get along with people is an essential 
part of education, that to know what is right is 
quite as important as to know what is true. "We 
are ready to supplement manual training with 
man training, willing to add to efficiency of pro- 
duction efficiency of understanding. When we 
have found us teachers capable of making these 
things clear, we shall have gone far toward mak- 
ing war impossible and peace worth while. 



294 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper pr 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxid 

Treatment Date: j^^Y 2001 

PreservationTechnolog 

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